Poetry: Dream Upon Waking by Mike Hickman

Dream Upon Waking

What if you knew that the dream is only a dream upon waking?
The night’s stories post-hoc assembled
from the first fragments of consciousness,
from the returning of the light and the regaining of the senses?
Everywhere you’ve been and all the time you’ve been away
invented in the slightest seconds of reboot;
non-memory rewritten, non-existence papered-over with
an illusion that you’ve been somewhere
and the story has continued,
when – in truth – there’s been no you and no story
and no dreams at all in those absent hours.
What if you knew that for sure?
Should that scare or comfort when contemplating the deeper sleep?
That we need to be conscious to be conscious of ourselves and what we’ve been?
That non-conscious means no self to dream, no past to haunt and no future to fear?
What might you do then with the moments to come?

Mike Hickman (@MikeHicWriter) is a writer from York, England. He has written for Off the Rock Productions (stage and audio), including 2018’s “Not So Funny Now” about Groucho Marx and Erin Fleming. He has recently been published in EllipsisZine, Dwelling Literary, Bandit Fiction, Nymphs, Flash Fiction Magazine, Brown Bag, and Safe and Sound Press. His co-written, completed six-part BBC radio sit com remains unproduced but available to interested producers!