This piece was submitted to the Citizen Journal project of the Peter-McGill Community Council. Please note that the opinions expressed in these articles do not necessarily reflect those of our organization. This project aims to create space for the voices of residents, students and friends of the neighbourhood through articles, photos, videos, and podcasts in any language. Are you interested in contributing? Contact us at benevolat@petermcgill.org!
Woolgathering was written for the 2022 Quebec Writer’s Federation Awards.
Woolgathering
by Djamila Mostefai
The first inevitable and truly sorrowful lesson we all come to face is the acceptance that it is impossible to dream a good dream twice. We all come to grieve that brief window of freedom spent away from everything and everyone else in our vociferous world. Soon, we learn to carefully admire the heavenly mist behind that window. We quickly salute its kind characters and enjoy a few bites of its sweetest pastries. A good dream is a child’s first goodbye, an adult’s saddest greeting.
According to one neurobiological theory, the “Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis”, dreams consist of electrical impulses that use random data from our memories. This means that we dream a lot and some dreams are simply more boring than the rest. In parallel, it is also important to note that while dreams occur at any moment of our sleep, the ones we remember in the morning take place in the REM (rapid eye movement) stage during which higher brain activity is recorded. In other words, amongst all the possible combinations our 86 billion neurons come up with, we remember those both worth remembering and those lucky enough to encounter our consciousness. Another interesting fact is that one is guaranteed to remember a dream following the sudden shock of an alarm. Remembering a dream after waking up on your own means said dream survived multiple sleep stages and a literal army of neurons to reach our world.
I don’t think you need me to understand why this is kind of romantic.
This is no homage to the poetry of dreams.
That has been written, sung, drawn, painted, performed, danced, discussed and tattooed.
I loathe repetition. I detest it so much that I just researched a synonym of the verb “ to loathe” to express my hatred for it. I refuse to be one of those unoriginal fanatics. I refuse to call you a daydream believer.
I’ve written multiple versions of this essay. Deciding which to submit is a process requiring logic and reason. I should write about a better world. Yes. Why not honour Martin Luther King? No, he’s too famous. Dreaming of equality is no longer creative in this unsymmetrical urban setting, is it? I should write my deepest and most agonizing struggles and draw a unique and personal connection to dreams to make it original (remembering to use writing devices and figures of speech).
Once a dream starts, there is nothing you can do to stop it. You are under the obligation to dream it until awakening (unless you yank yourself awake, but wouldn’t that be a nightmare?)
I am a young woman with great ambitions. I dream of success and health. I admit, I do enjoy a good romcom, or a touching song about a past lover, but I do not obsess, fantasize or hope for a slightly longer embrace at every encounter. Let alone dream of it. I’ve written countless pages. Disease and depression. Family and childhood pain. Difference and oppression.
All I care to brag about is the overwhelming luck I possess when encountering and catching a running dream twice, as a foolish child would.
A dream is a drop of water in an immense desert. A dream is health after ravaging illness., A dream is everything in nothingness, grandiosity in the face of simplicity, a goddamn life changing political movement, an act of kindness in ubiquitous violence, a gasp of air in a ravaging flood. A dream is crumbs of bread in murderous famine.
Wouldn’t writing of anything else than the truth be cowardly? How could I face such grandeur and feign passion? Wouldn’t it be immoral (and frankly controversial) to stand for my own and have my heart scoff at the rage any true activist feels when advocating? How shameful of me. Still, how can anger compare when none of these militants could ever shield me as you do?
A dream is not our cold breaths greeting each other before our lips meet. Of all dreams, of all universes and their windows, of all the infinite possibilities my incredibly cliché neurons could come up with, you’re what I choose?
A dream is not your very small fingers tracing my very insignificant shoulder beneath the lights of the city.
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