The Trouble With Dreams

Parzival Angist

Poem Form: Free Verse
Written: October 2023
First Performed: Bardic Madness XXV (November 4 2023), for Challenge 3.2 - “Perchance to Dream”

Why is it that one common man
Wishes another pleasant dreams
And prays to not be plagued
By the horrors of nightmares?

Dreams may give us the chances we do not have
To live full lives,
To do grand things,
To see places thought impossible.

To reunite with loved ones since lost,
To find love when life has none.
To find happiness for the first time
That you can ever recall.

But then to awake to find them for naught,
None but a fiction of the mind.
The joy they brought fading
Just as quickly as their memory.

The common man takes this as a gift,
A short reprieve from the troubles of life.
But I find no comfort, no respite
In this farce of the mind.

For it makes a mockery of what I desire
In my deepest of hearts
But lies far out of my reach
Within the world of the waking.

If one may remain within the dream
And live in glorious illusion forever
Then I too would seek their deceptions
But thus is not the way of life.

No, I shall take the nightmares.
For never once have I awoken from a nightmare
To find myself disappointed by the reality I found myself in.
But it is from the most pleasant of dreams
That I begin my day weeping

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