In my dreams I can walk.

I’m going to tell you a story about a dream I had recently wherein I could walk. 

I have these dreams often. They’re often like epic movies so chock full of detail I am disoriented for a good hour after I awaken. I wonder where I am. I once tried to stand up after awakening from a dream like this. In this real MS-life I am living I cannot stand without the aid of a lift and another human to put me on said lift.

It’s funny because I’m aware that it’s a surprising fact, while I’m dreaming of what feels like my real-current life where I very clearly have a terrible version of MS, that suddenly I can walk! I’m clearly dreaming of my current life with MS but somehow, I can walk and it’s the best feeling ever. 

I’ll be in any number of situations, like last night, for example, I was in a store front/office/hair salon – in this particular dreamthe building was all three at the same time. Strange. But Dream Me finds it perfectly normal so I go with it. I usually do this “go with it” cognitive dissonance thing in my most epic dreams. It just feels so real. Why fight it?

The office-part of this dream building contained an advertising agency where some people I used to work with were working still – specifically a particular ex-boyfriend and his current wife– along with some mutual old friends of ours from a long ago time in my life where I was still with this particular guy but probably shouldn’t have been. 

In real life, this particular ex-boyfriend unceremoniously and suddenly dumped me for his current wife. I suppose he went through some kind of strange and unforeseen metamorphosis from the typical ad-agency art director bad boy architype who wears only black clothing and had long should-length hair into a spiritual, soulful, nature-loving, bike-riding yogi. 

This transition from Old Rob to New Rob made it so my old friends all felt the old him and the new-and-improved him weren’t the same person anymore so they couldn’t justify judging him by old-him standards. Some of my closest friends at that time became his friend again. After crushing my heart so entirely such that I didn’t think I would survive it, these friends could overlook that fact and allow him back into their lives.

You can imagine how well it went over with me that my closest friends could overlook how badly this guy hurt me and let him into their lives, again. It didn’t go over very well with me then (and now, if I’m honest) but I had a good reason. And it centered around a story this guy told me once at the very height of our love. It was a story about a woman who falls in love with a snake.

This all becomes relevant to my walking dream! I promise. But I will totally understand anyone who chooses not to read any further. This is a LOT.

Back to the in-real-life snake tale that Rob told me. It was an annoying story then and it still irks me when I think about itnow. The story was about a snake and a woman who fall in love. Rob told me this story while we sat in a dark dive bar on barstools looking deeply into each other’s eyes while he chain-smoked Newport cigarettes and we ordered drink after drink. We did a lot of that kind of thing in those days. During one of those times, Rob explained to me that it was inevitable that he would hurt me eventually. He told me the story about the snake to illustrate his point.

In this story the snake and the woman fall deeply in love, so much over time that she begins to feel safe with the snake that she loves and she forgets the reality that this creature is, in fact, a snake. 

One perfectly normal day, the woman and the snake are snuggling together on a beach on a serene lake shore when the snake suddenly bites the woman. He bites her hard. This bite comes completely out of the blue and the snake really hurts the woman badly. The woman is shaken to her core. “How could you just bite me like that? I thought you loved me and would never intentionally hurt me.” 

The snake looks at the woman and simply says, “I bit you because I’m a snake. That’s just what snakes do.”

This ex-boyfriend explained to me that he was, in fact, a snake and when one is a snake, one is always a snake and that’s just the way it is. The snake can’t fight its fundamental nature for so long before he acts in the way snakes always act. He loved me with all of his heart, he told me earnestly, all the words I needed to hear to feel safe in this relationship

It was inevitable, he explained to me in real life oh-so-long ago,that he would hurt me horribly because he was a snake. Plain and simple. I refused to believe him in real life when he first told me this story, and even in my dream when he re-counted the snake story to Dream Me again, I still didn’t believe him. 

In my dream, I walk into a storefront building in the hipster part of town where the floors are reclaimed wood and old stained-glass hangs in some of the windows. The ad agency is on the left side of the building and the hair salon is on the right, separated by a giant exposed brick wall because all decent hipster dwellings should have an exposed brick wall shouldn’t they?

I don’t realize at first that this hair salon is connected to this advertising agency where people I don’t really want to see happen to work but when it hits me, I have a moment of panic. None of these people have yet to see me with any of my various mobility aids. These are the last people I want seeing this new version of me, I can distinctly remember thinking in my dream brain, so I decide to walk through the door without the help of Clara or Nitro, my two rollators that I know are in the trunk of my car. I’ll just hold on to stuff – walls and furniture and people if I had to. There’s usually something I can cling to in order to stay on my feet. Nobody will notice, Dream Me thought. I’ll just pretend I don’t need these tools of disability. It will be fine. 

This dream building wasn’t my regular, go-to-in-real-life hair salon and even in my dream I remember being confused about why I found myself in this strange place. I knew it was close to closing time at the salon. I needed my bleached blond roots done and my hair cut and there was no way there would be time to do both. It vaguely occurs to me that I shouldn’t be doing either of those things in this unknown hair salon/ad agency hybrid business because I had Old Me’s very high-maintenance platinum colored hair. I was even loyal to my hair stylist in my dream and I told myself that I was there now and turning around and walking out would probably draw more attention to my disabled presence there than just staying and doing the damn hair. So I decide to stay.

There is a girl at the front desk who explains I have to wait a few minutes for the right stylist but I can sit over on the other side, in one of the cubicles, to wait.

“The other side” is where the ad agency is located in this dream. There are people over there who I really don’t want to see me wall surfing as I attempt to walk like a normal person without a debilitating disease, but when I turn around to walk, my legs move just fine. Huh. That’s weird. But I take the win and walk over to the ad agency-side of the building and sit down, staring down at my phone to avoid making eye contact with Rob, his wife or anyone else from my old life before I had MS. But it was already too late. Rob had already noticed me. 

In my dream, Rob immediately slides into the other side of the red vinyl booth that I’m sitting in – it’s a booth now and not a cubicle but I can’t remember when that happened. He gives me a sheepish smile, a hint of the old twinkle that I remember him having in his eye when he looked at me in the past – back when he was still married to wife #1 and had his sights set on me without me really realizing it right away. I remember that look instantly in my dream and I tell myself silently to ignore it. Ignore the flirty twinkle eyes!

He’s not that person anymore, Dream Me told myself, and neither am I. I also I have a disease now, even if I can suddenly seem to walk really well without any aid, but I somehow also simultaneously know that this walking miracle won’t last any longer than it takes me to get out of this weird building and back to my car.

My dream brain is amazingly vivid. I see he’s kind of bald now – the hair on the top of his head is wispy and thin not thick and black like it used to be, the stubble on his face is salt and pepper but it’s not completely unappealing to me. He looks older but his eyes still have that old familiar twinkle. I sternly tell myself to stop this line of thinking and get the hell out of there and away from him, but I can’t leave. I remember that I’m about to get my hair done and I really need a haircut and color. 

Dream me, who can suddenly walk, stays put in the booth while ex-boyfriend asks me all sorts of questions about how I’ve been etc etc and I lie and tell him how GREAT I am. This is when I notice the current wife noticing me in the booth from across the room and and she looked none too happy. I casually mention this turn of events to him hoping he will leave me and help us all avoid a messy confrontation. I suddenly realize that have to pee really badly and I’m not sure if my miraculous walking ability will be with me or not when I try to slide out of this booth and walk the very long distance to the back of this weird building full of people I don’t very much want to see and where the bathrooms are located so very far away. I twist around to look and there is nothing to hold on to between my booth and that bathroom and I start to panic a little. 

Dream ex-boyfriend gets up and walks back to current wife in her own booth who appears to be acting out some scene from a play with a troop of other audaciously dressed actors who are all dressed in Shakespearian get ups. Current wife is playing some kind of witch, her costume is made of black filmy layers that flow as she waves her arms around to warn the hero of some long ago foretold tragedy. Her hair is very long and in dirty blonde dread locks. I see him walk over to her and kiss her on the head, holding the top of her dread-covered head with both hands as if to reassure her that she has nothing to worry about from the likes of me (which she doesn’t obviously because Dream Me is shockingly not into this situation at all). 

I decide it’s time to make my escape to the bathroom. 

As I slide out of the red vinyl booth that suddenly looks like the booths in a local bar where we used to hang out, hiding our affair from the world and doing a terrible job at it. When my left foot hits the black and white square-tiled floor and I notice I’m suddenly wearing very high heeled black Manolo Blahnikpumps. This is a very bad turn of events but I really have to peeso I put tentative weight on to that sleek heel and begin to stand up and lo! I don’t fall over. 

“Ok. Huh,” I tell myself. This miraculous walking ability I seem to have in my dream is holding up. I don’t teeter. I walk quickly to the back of this suddenly giant hair salon/ad agency building and get myself to the bathroom. I’m not in there five minutes when the front desk girl from the hair salon opens the door to find me. It’s finally my turn. It’s 10pm. 

It hits me that the ad agency is celebrating some kind of event and that’s why their space suddenly turned into a retro-bar scene so all of the people I don’t really want to see will be hanging around a even longer. In my mind it hits me with 100% clarity that there is a time limit on my magic legs that can walk in those amazing shoes. I suddenly know without a doubt that I need to get out of there by 11PM or I will be crawling out of that building on my hands and knees. Then what becomes of my earlier protestations of how GREAT I’m doing? I will be outed as the disabled fraud that I am. I may break actual bones if I fall in these shoes.

I explain to the hair salon people that we’re just going to have to skip the color part of this deal and head straight to the hair cut part of the program but the team of four stylists (yes four, I have no idea why four people have stayed late to take care of my hair needs and I suddenly feel pressure to let them do what they want with me since they all stayed so late and all).

“Can we cut my hair dry? I’m kind of in a hurry,” I say, as girl number 1 pushes me into a black reclining chair in front of a sink and douses my hair with water. “Sorry, no, we need to give you a glaze to tone down those yellow tones, it won’t take a minute,” she says but Dream Me knows how long a glaze to tone down yellow tones in bleached hair will take but I’m stuck in the sink with a wet head by now, completely at the mercy of this troop of really intensely dedicated hair stylists. I open my eyes when I feel someone touch my arm and it’s ex-boyfriend telling me to come back to the party after my hair is done. We’ll all have so much fun! (OR NOT, dream Me thinks, very clearly intending to bolt the minute my head is dry again).