The thing about dreams is that they are your mind's way of solving life's problems while you enter sleep. At times, they tend to be compounded and complex, making them appear pointless and not worth the while to piece together. This has been my stance on dreams, nothing worth my time or my effort to explain. Dreams are the compounded embodiment of the day's happening, nothing more and nothing less. This had been my outlook up until recently.

A little known fact about my personal life is that I've never had an actual girlfriend in my seventeen years of living. Not that I couldn't, just that I felt that love was a fictional emotion, the dreamer's emotion. At times I thought I had felt love towards another, but my stoic nature had always gotten the best of me, sitting back and watching events play out without interference. I realized though, after much observation, that love as we know it is not love, just lust, the lust to reproduce and continue the human species, a basic instinctive quality every being has carried since the dawn of time. The will to survive.

This will to survive I have never questioned as I have witnessed it first-hand throughout my entire existance. Whether it being put under so much pressure you use every fiber of your being to escape or giving in hoping that the world will have pity and see that you live. Again, another instinctive quality about humans, the selfish desire to not pass into the great unknown fearing what lies beyond. This outlook I have on life, no matter how pessimistic or negative it is, has been the basis of my entire belief system.

However, this isn't the end of my story. No, I have much more to tell. My mother, when I was a only ten, was diagnosed with a cancer called multiple myeloma, a cancer that has many treatments, but no known cure. In short, those with multiple myeloma die of multiple myeloma. All I can say is that I have denied to myself the fact that my mom could die from this, she has always been my personal symbol of strength through adversity and she has proved herself as such. For the time she has had this cancer, there had been no change in her condition, this cancer had not become active. It stayed like this for seven years, and I thought it would continue to be inactive for seven years more. A couple months ago, my mom was going into more detail about her cancer, explaining that it was like a time bomb, eventually it will go off and destroy everything.

Ironic how she described it. "Like a time bomb". I really didn't expect to hit like it did. About five days from Christmas, my mom's kidneys failed, causing her to slip into a coma and she had to be transported to the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix for immediate care. She quickly recovered from her condition but when she woke, she was told she had at the most three days to live. Of course, she didn't tell me nor my brothers that, assuring us that she would be home by Christmas. However, my mom did not die in the predicted three days, in fact she still lives to this very moment, showing me the source of her strength: Love. Love for my dad. Love for my brothers. Love for me. Love, that fictional emotion of dreamer's, the catalyst for this inner strength. Quite a surprise for myself when I deciphered this truth. This love for us, my family, had been the only factor determining my mother's perseverance. She wants to be there for us, there to be the guiding light, there to be the guardian and protector.

Of course, this cancer will catch up to her and she will die. It is an inevitable truth, a truth I'll have face, that we all will have to face. But from death I have discovered love, proof of existance and evidence that I can truly feel this "dreamer's emotion" as well. It has opened my eyes and unlocked my mind, everyone will have lustful desires, but a lucky few will discover love such as I.

Recently I have been dating this girl from my Latin II class at my highschool. I'm not sure why I have been drawn to her but the fates have been kind to me to show that I can express my love through her. I have said nothing of the topic to her because I have yet to understand what her ideas are on the thought. However, I can feel how this emotion eats at me when I'm not near her, when she feels pain I feel pain, when she smiles I smile. This strange link I have between her is the only way I can describe love, not as one feeling but a multitude of emotions, the desire to and willingness to sacrifice it all for the well-being of another.

If I need to provide more evidence of love, let me, to the best of my ability, describe my recent dreams. There have been only two, one that involves this girl I have been dating, and another that concerns my dying mother. The dreams with girl have been quite simple, almost a replication of reality. The thing is that when I have these dreams I feel overwhelming joy, just the illusion of having her near is enough to show I can still love. The second dream, the one with my mom, is nothing less than morbid. Every time I have this dream my mom is dying but I don't feel any pain. In fact, I can't feel anything. I always wake up midway through the dream and I end up not being able to get back to sleep for a hour or so. I think of how I could not feel anything when my mom was dying in that dream and what a heartless monster I am. Up until now, that has been my understanding. I now realize that the reason I did not feel anything while I watched my mom die wasn't that I didn't care, but I understood the inevitability of the situation. All the pain and suffering my mother has gone through would end and she would be in bliss, a fate that sounds appealing to anyone.

So, I have come full-circle. Back onto the subject of dreams and of this, this is what I have to say. The world in which we inhabit of full of evil and misunderstanding and confusion. Then we dream to make sense of it all and most do not take the time to understand what our unconscious mind churns out when we sleep. For the few who do, they can see the simplicity of the dream scape and escape the complexity of reality and grasp a concept of the workings of the world. To all of this, to all of this confusion that plagues are lives, I say this, if this is the world, I'd rather dream.