Wake Up, You're Dreaming

This morning my younger daughter told me that we are actually dreaming right now. She explained that we are really asleep, back home in San Marcos, and that this is just a dream. I was reading something on the computer at that moment. I stopped, looked up at her.

"What?"

"We're dreaming, daddy."

Her suggestion that this is all a dream actually helped clear up a few things - not the least of which was that my four year old was suddenly talking like a stoned college student. But it also raised some provocative questions. I had to know. When exactly did we fall asleep?

This is the point in the dream when I expected her to turn into my third grade teacher, Mrs. French. Well, she would still be Luci, but she would also be my third grade teacher. And this would be an apartment in Cairo, but it would also be the student center at Southwest Texas State University. And I would be terribly late for something vague, yet important. Perhaps it is not that kind of dream.

It could be that her assertion that we are still in San Marcos is true. I have experienced dreams within dreams before. But I am a fairly light sleeper and can't imagine going quite this long without waking up.

There certainly are things that have not quite added up - sequences and chronologies that I ponder over. There are people who I remember seeing at events who could not possibly have been there because I had not met them yet. There are little glitches in time. Last week on a British Airways flight from Houston to London I asked for a Heineken. The flight attendant handed me the beer. I took a sip and realized, without even seeing the tell tale Arabic writing on the can, that this was one of the terrible Heineken knock offs that is brewed in Cairo. This was a connecting flight. The plane was not going anywhere near Cairo. Why the Egyptian beer? For a moment I thought that I had never left - had just dreamed my trip to Texas.

Maybe I have been asleep even longer. Maybe I am sleeping off some dangerous pozole in Guanajuato, or slumbering at the house where I lived in Houston. Could it be that I never left Egypt at all? I am sixteen years old and stuck in a dream where I grew up, got fat, and somehow found my way back to Egypt. Am I trying to wake up?

Am I really married, or did I dream that too? If that is the case, I don't actually have a daughter who asks freaky existential questions. Then, like a chill going through my soul, it occurred to me to ask her the really big question - the one that could either wake me up or possibly even snuff me out of existence as I know it.

"Uh Luci, is this your dream or mine?"