Dream

I don't generally bother you with my dreams. I don't know if I've ever written one here. But last night was unusual. Simple, hard, unusual. I woke up after it began at 11 PM. Then again at 1:10 AM. Again at 3:30 AM, then 4:15 AM and then at 5 AM, when I got up for good. I had the same dream the entire night. It never stopped. That alone was amazing.
For being so long it was a very simple dream.
The world was a moonscape. There was no life. No matter where I looked, there was not a sign of life. Not that it was dead, it simply was not alive and never had been. I went everywhere, including to other planets. Nothing. Not even our sun, just the very vaguest of illumination, enough to see that there was nothing. I woke up feeling blue.
I got up, pee'd, drank some water, went back to bed.
The same nothing. In fact almost a mottled nothing. Just a mottled colored planet surface on all the planets.
I traveled everywhere again and then woke up again. I was crying a little. It was a sad place with no life.
When I began to dream the dream again, I discovered a couple of others, like me, who were just as sad at the absence of life as I was. When we began to talk, we began to see a couple of shoots pop out of the ground. They quickly grew into trees on the otherwise barren landscape.
I woke up amazed, drank more water, went back to bed.
This time I saw a lot of people. They were arguing over the trees that had sprouted. Someone told them to stop being selfish. Just start being nice and sharing the trees and see what happened.
When they did, a lot of trees began to fill the landscape. And buildings appeared, and cities and rivers and the sun. And everybody was pretty happy that the world was back to being the world again, full of life, full of a bit of danger, full of energy.
I woke again, pee'd, went back to bed, sure that was the last of it.
It wasn't. This time people were back to being people: Some nice, some selfish. Whenever they were selfish things died or just disappeared and went back to just being not alive.
I began to tell people that though it sounded like some awfully written science fiction book, the fact was that we apparently had to do a couple of things to keep the world vibrant: We had to first accept that we needed to agree that the world would only be the world if we all allowed ourselves to believe it was full of trees and animals and people and so forth. And then we would have to be decent to each other to keep that image of the world alive.
Someone said they'd already read a story like that. I told them it didn't matter. What mattered was that to keep the beautiful world we'd have to do our best to get along.
Most people agreed.
I woke up again for the last time. I went to the kitchen and put the coffee on, then brushed my teeth, and thought about the dream. Really corny, I know, but I really had it. So I guess I must believe it on some level. What I really believe in normal hours is that the world will be beautiful and full of vibrant life whether people are here or not. What I think the dream was showing me was that if we're not nice, not decent, then we'll live in a world where we can't see that vibrant life. Where our lives are just a lifeless, mottled moonscape.
Very very corny.
But it was also very cool to be shown it from that perspective.
Ain't life grand?