It used to happen more often and I cannot define a point where the frequency decreased; my guess is that life gradually took a hold of me, forcing my hand, removing the luxury of drifting to sleep and replacing it with the necessity of waking. I can still find that place though, if I prepare, if I eschew other parts of the world to find those pleasant moments spent living lucidly behind closed eyelids in total darkness.

It always starts the same in completely different ways. I close my eyes and listen to the ambient aural vista, picking out and identifying abnormal sounds or inconsistencies in rhythm so that I am not surprised by them should I start awake in the night. The darkness behind my eyelids begins to fill with colours and shapes, swirling and coalescing into pictures of the day just passed or the days to come. Eventually, the worrying for tomorrow and the lamenting for yesterday will fade and leave behind a blank canvas to paint with whatever I desire.

The image I paint is always different while being identical every time:

“If I were granted three wishes, what would they be?”

Such a childish, fanciful, impossible picture to sketch, but this line of thought is always brought forward by my unwinding mind, always treated as something probability allows, always triggering sensations of excitement at the impossibilities, always to failing to move beyond the first wish.

The stalling point is that this vision of a granted wish needs to be rock solid, defined by rules and lacking loopholes for the granter to slip through — stopping the possibility of “Be careful what you wish for,” ever being spoken. Notebooks are painted across my mind, filled with the specifics for the wish being requested, and the list of details gets longer every time my imaginative brush touches the eyelid canvas. The outline is iterated until eventually, the one wish is so comprehensive that the other two are not needed at all. Just as the wish is granted and my brain moves from wish definition to wish utilisation, I move from my dream to my dreams and I fall asleep.

I would tell you what the wish is, the one rule that covers everything I see the world needing, but there are some creative fancies that work best inside a childish mind.

It used to happen more often and I cannot say why the frequency has now decreased; Perhaps I know the rules of my imagination so well now that I can paint the picture even with my eyes open. But, after I have said goodnight to you, I dream, and then I dream.