DeepEnd

In my dreams, I am almost always about 17. Sometimes I am 21. I am 37 IRL. In my dreams I visit people, I just hang out with them. I did this last night. I was lucid. I rode my bike to a friends house, it was a couple of guys, not guys I was interested in, just friends. One was working on his car. Something boxy in the late 90's fashion. The other was checking his phone. They were kind of nerdy, D&D type of guys. The one working on his car was a heavy set neckbeard type of male, in his early 20's and the other was a skinny, ginger with curly hair and an Adam's apple that screamed not my type. But we were friends, it was fun just sitting there smoking cigarettes, asking what they were up to and seeing if they were going to go to the "arcade" later. They weren't. He shared something important with me before I left, and I will share it in a minute. The arcade is a place I visited in another dream, over a year ago, but I visited it twice since. Everyone is there, all of my old friends from highschool, and all about 19 - or 21 is years old. Even dead friends are there, in the dream world there is no distinction. Dead or alive, we all exist as we were. I had never seen these two boys before in waking life, but I know that I know them. I know them. I know their souls somehow, we are friends, we are at ease with each other. The kind of ease where there is no sexual tension, the kind of ease when you can just hang out in silence looking at Facebook (even though 20 years ago FB didn't exist) on your phone and it is cohesive. After about an hour I took off and said goodbye. I told some other friends that I wanted to go to the Arcade and asked if they thought people would be there. They said yes. I knew that when I got there I would see several people from my past and it would be easy, like old times. Maybe have a beer and play a game of pool - even though I am an alcoholic and haven't picked up a bottle since 2013. But it is different there. This morning I learned that this place has a name, it is called the "Deepdown." There we don't age, the dead aren't dead, and alcoholism isn't a thing. There in the "Deepdown" we are young, we are immortal, the feeling of friendship and love prevails. The Deepdown is what I call the dreaming place, the lucid place. It is a real place. I know it's real, it is more than the firing of random neurons pretending it is real. I know it's real because I know my way around the Deepdown. There is a theater I can find, an old town that used to have people in in it before 1998, but they moved along to keep up with the tourism and the big box stores, the old ladies in Flo caps and aprons smoke cigarettes and point to pictures on the wall that show old pictures of big holiday parades, people lined up on the sides of the street to watch the floats, and the celebrities and to peek in the store windows. The restaurants are mostly empty, their decor is old Ponderosa Pine and Wagon Wheels, and cobwebs. Most of the store fronts are boarded up now. In the Deepdown my parents are young, they are in their 30's or 40's. They think I am a kid. I have to sneak out and being under the stars, smelling the grass, hearing the crickets as I zoom on my bike towards a place to meet my friends is exhilarating. Only in the Deepdown do I get to see these people, do I get to remember the thrill of being young and of being free and the smell of the night when it smelled like endless possibilities. Not all dreams take me to the Deepdown, some are shallow, some barely scratch the surface, you can tell-they are superficial. I don't know the people there. But in the Deepdown, when my subconscious has plunged through layers and layers of whatever it is that constructs the dark spaces between memories, I am in a real place. I've seen my friends who have passed from this earth, there they don't know they are dead, because there I guess they aren't. I'm totally lucid in this place, I could effect things, I could change the color of the sky or tell my parents I am 37 years old, but I don't. I just enjoy it. I marvel at how young they look. Call it what you want, I call it the Deepdown. Because that is how it feels, it feels like a whole other Universe, way Deep Down inside of the layers that constitute my awareness. I know it is called this because that is what my friend told me. I looked up at the stars and I smelled the sweetness of being young and out in the night with people I liked. I said- What is this place? The boy looked up at me, he looked through huge thin brass aviator glasses that had smudges on them and he took them off to clean them. He put them back on and he smiled at me. He said - "This is the Deepdown" He ran the words together just like that. I could see the words in my mind as he said them, they were together, not separate like we would say it here, but one word- the "Deepdown." "Why is that important?" I asked, excited to hear him say something I felt was significant. He looked at me bored. "In the Deepdown, you know them." And I did- I do. I know them. In the Deepdown, nothing changes, I know them, they know me. I woke up knowing for certain that the people I speak to, the friends I see in that place that he calls the "Deepdown" are people I know, just as I knew them then, unchanged and it is comforting to know I will go back again.