Reality Check

They say that the best way

to tell that you’re dreaming is to look at your hands.

So the legend goes:

if you suspect that you’re dreaming. Check your hands

(your brain tends to add and subtract digits).

They call it a reality check. In truth, checking your hands may not be

the most sure-fire way to know that you’re dreaming, and everyone

finds their own reality check.

I think I’ve figured mine out.

When I dream,

my room is clean.

No socks on the bedside table, nor a crumb on the floor.

In fact, there is enough blue carpet to be sure

that there indeed is a floor.

When each pillow is in its case

I know that I’m dreaming.

And though my mind seems to be impressing upon me the opposite conclusion,

I know for sure that I didn’t clean this room, even in my dreams.

How could it ever be me?

If I can’t call idle fingers to that action in

a world of muddy mundanity

then what time would I have found

before ice-skating with Barney and teaching the pope to Beatbox

to have hung up my coat or have placed my medications

somewhere I’d locate them in the morning?

Dreams can be fantasy,

comedies and tragedies

playing out in plastic principalities;

far off places

where we can be more than we are.

I’ve had athletic dreams,

entreprenurial dreams,

romantic dreams,

religious, ecstatic dreams

but nowadays, cutting through the present static seems

more pressing than a future scene.

One day I do hope again to believe a dream.

But it seems a more brilliant strategy to set the bar low

with minimal weight

then the burden of life may be light enough to bear.

And is a clean room really such a small dream anyway?

if it was

why does it elude so many?

God, I pray for the day that I can wake up

and my room is in order;

and I look to my hands

And I see ten fingers.