The Dreamwalker

Many people think the word “superhero” comes hand in hand with the idea of having superpowers. Many others believe it is not necessary to be an alien or lab experiment to have what it takes to deserve such a title—pop culture has taught us there’s always a way. Many will do it through money, many will do it through need. Many will train at the top of some mountain for years on end and many will just have to crash into the right one at the right time. Many will do it to satisfy the fiery need to do justice but will eventually fail to see that it is not through the role of executioner that justice is served. It doesn’t take superpowers to become a superhero, but it doesn’t take being a superhero to become the oblivious vessel to superpowers either. Because in a universe of which we understand so little, who is anyone to say superpowers are strictly reserved for a television screen or comic book page? No, superpowers, not unlike mutants, live among us. They manifest themselves in the simplest of ways and live in disguise behind a screen of normal. They’re the fact that we can build worlds inside our heads when we’re distracted, and they’re the idea that some can be more connected to this one than others when they’re attentive. They’re the memories we dismiss as dreams but that in reality tell tales of journeys to both past and future—not like time-travel as we conventionally think about it, using teleportation to suddenly appear in some other point in history, but more like a literal voyage to another point in time.

I knew a dreamwalker once. He was the one that explained it to me. He told me stories about his travels, about what he’d learned about the universe and how learning had only made him grow more ignorant. He claimed that was the reason he tried not to make much sense out of it, and I believed him. I would constantly think about it, what it must do to the mind to not be bound by the same laws physical space is, though I still suppose a big part of not making much sense of it wasn’t really his to decide in the first place. As a matter of fact, he was often open about a big part of the whole process of dreamwalking not being his to control at all. He would never decide where to go or when to go, and he would never know where he was once he arrived—only time would tell. At first he convinced himself of it being nothing but games his mind played—it felt like an easy task finding an explanation to the feeling as long as he kept revisiting places he had already passed through in life, nothing but relived experiences wrongfully categorized as recollections by misled logic. But it was revisiting the unknown while awake that made him certain of his abilities and, though he never figured out where they came from or how to control them, he grew aware of the uncommon relationship he shared with space and time.

That was always one of my favorite things to talk about, the way we pondered on how superpowers might or might not be nothing but different degrees of connection between the self and the whole. Control over the elements, shapeshifting, telekinesis…they’re all classic examples of abilities popularly defined as superpowers and yet they can be interpreted as nothing but unique relationships between whatever it is that existence is and whatever it is that we are to it. And so we figured, if time is a dimension, it’s not that he could time-travel per se, but rather that he could access it and, more importantly, move across it. He would wake up one day to a dream he had had weeks before, as he would go to sleep to a day he was yet to live. But it wasn't until after several episodes of dreaming about that which he had already undergone that he realized dimensions and consciousness merge in a rather unfathomable way—it wasn’t until becoming someone else and watching himself experience life as he once had that he was made aware that perhaps, and only perhaps, the mind is also a dimension of its own.

We thought the idea to be fascinating, even groundbreaking. We never stopped to think about the fact that we were probably just a number in a long list of people who had already explored the idea even when we spent an awful lot of time thinking about whether or not there were others like him out there and whether or not it was possible for any of them to be discovered while on the other side. We wondered if it was even possible to gain control over such abilities through meditation or some other sort of training we might not even know exists, and we often asked the sky for a sign to know if any of these others already had—perhaps they had a thing or two to teach.

And we laughed, we laughed about it but still I believe the matter both afflicted and pacified him—no matter how powerless he felt, at the end of the day he always found solace in the belief that some things are just not for us to know. He thought maybe control was one of them and, to this day, I still couldn’t agree more. But the part we wondered most about was that perhaps traveling to other moments in time was nothing but a random consequence of his abilities. Maybe, he wasn’t that much of a time-traveler as he was a dimension-traveler. Could he ever manage to go somewhere that didn’t necessarily belong to the realm of time? Another physical location without having to be constantly haunted by the evoked ticking of clock hands, perhaps. Maybe even parts of the universe our fragile bodies would never be able to go. Maybe parts of our bodies only universes go. But nevertheless, he could never read minds. He could never actually take over someone else and he could never fully detach himself from his own persona even as he stood looking at himself through the eyes of another as if the brown in his own were a mirror. He felt stuck. He felt stuck in a condition of mysticism, and he felt burdened with the condition of awareness, the sort of awareness that allows you to witness without acting.

The demonstrating kind.

The paralyzing kind.

And so it was in a dream of my own that I last saw The Dreamwalker. I saw him through my own eyes, no question there, but I’m almost certain his were nothing but a construction of mine, nothing but a recollection brought to mind by the most basic of human nostalgia. Still, I like to think he visits me in his dreams, maybe looking through my eyes to see me in his, reliving all those nights of ongoing wonderlust and, who knows, maybe anticipating our next encounter, if such a thing is ever to happen. But wherever or whenever The Dreamwalker is, whether or not our paths are to cross again at some point in some dimension and whether or not he ever managed to visit more than one kind of world is now for my imagination to explore. I sometimes immerse myself in the thought that he is now an all-powerful walker, with no realm beyond his reach. Maybe he was always an all-powerful walker, and it’s our humanly limited understanding of time that forced us to meet in a point before his integration to infinity, a metamorphosis through which he can now freely rewatch and relive, never again held a slave to the condition of witness. And so I made a pact with myself not to let the tale of The Dreamwalker stay a dream and not to keep his memory a role of witness—to think that we spend so much time trying to assign an explanation to the wielding of something we might call a “superpower” when in reality maybe that’s just what a superpower is, to rise above the witness in us.