Inception: Am I Dreaming Right Now?

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.

-W.B. Yeats, The Cloths of Heaven

Without divulging anything about the movie Inception, other than the fact that it deals with the slippage between dreams and reality, I need to tell you how my life, in one instance, became curiously akin to the film.

On Monday morning, after I pressed the snooze button for the second time, I fell into a deep, lucid dream, which is not at all unusual for me. In this dream, I was in my parents' basement digging through a box for a stuffed animal my grandfather bought me over twenty years ago. In reality, I'd been thinking about my grandfather a lot lately, and I'd been meaning to search for the stuffed animal I was seeking in this dream. As I got deeper into the box, memories and keepsakes were flying over my head until I reached the bottom and pulled out the bear as though it was victim to a rip-tide. Then I woke up.

I was sad to be awake and far from this childhood treasure again, but the moment of contact filled my heart with light.

Last night, after dinner with my parents, I asked my mom if she knew of a box of my belongings in the basement. She said no, but I went to look for it anyway. I felt a pull towards a corner of the basement I'd been in plenty of times, then I lifted a cushion, and found a box that said "Helen" on it. I don't remember filling, moving, or seeing this box before, but I knew it was mine due to the dots I'd drawn on the serifs in my name.

Furiously, I dug through the mystery box, handing this to my mom and that to Danny and, at the bottom, I found the bear I touched in my dreams. A miracle of the subconscious kind.