A classmate told me she doesn’t like dreaming, because it leaves you exhausted once you wake up. Maybe so. Dreams take memories that are already distant and toss them even further away, so that you reach for them with all your strength and still can’t grasp them. Those memories turn into something cloud-like and imagined, or some state that can’t be named at all, existing only in the past, and in the life experiences you cared about and treasured the most.

After a long time passes, you think you’ve finally forgotten that person, those things — she no longer appears in your life. Slowly, she becomes a name, an expression, or just a single sentence, and later still, everything disappears, even the feeling itself.

But then, one morning, you’re jolted awake by a dream, your eyes wide open, your body burning hot, your mouth opening and your hand reaching out, desperately trying to call out, to grasp something. You feel as if something has gone wrong — why did you have to wake up into the real world? Thinking back on it, you’d felt at peace, wrapped in a settled sense of happiness; that person — whom you hadn’t seen in who knows how many years — had truly, vividly come back. Details that once felt close enough to touch — her gestures, her expressions, her clothes, even the way her lips moved when she spoke — you feel a fierce desire to keep them from slipping away.

Every time you think of this, you get scared, afraid that you might have just talked loudly in your sleep and your roommates heard you. You sit up, glance around, and see them still sound asleep, snoring away — nothing happened. Even if they had heard, they wouldn’t know who she was — are you just confusing yourself? You get out of bed quickly, walk fast to the bathroom, and stare at your own bewildered, haggard face in the mirror, then splash on cold water, again and again, washing everything clean, so that nothing is left behind. That’s what you thought, and that’s what you did.

Lately I’ve been having a lot of dreams, dreaming of all sorts of strange old things — not nightmares, but exhausting all the same. No matter how late I go to sleep, I always wake up at the tail end of a dream before six. I want to live a settled, ordinary life, but I can’t manage it. I’m troubled by dreams again — I don’t want to wake into reality. This entry isn’t about anyone in particular — it only comes after the dream.