Butterflies

   You know that joke where the man dreams he is eating a giant marshmallow, and when he wakes up, his pillow is gone? That actually happened to me once. It's apparently a joke about eating your pillow in your sleep or whatever, but I never realized that; I just figured it must have been a common (enough) experience that I wasn't the only one.

   The pillow turned out to have fallen off of the bed and rolled underneath it, in case you were wondering. But none of that is what this post is about.

   I had a dream once, when I was very young. A different dream. I know I wrote part of it down, in stapled-together homebound book format, or at least illustrated it. The original book has probably been lost to the garage, like so many others from that era (the likewise unfinished books of the Aladdin and Dragon Tales dreams spring to mind,) but it wasn't much of a plot, so I can remember it well. Even then, it wasn't so much a plot as an idea... the dream was about a butterfly. The dream was about a butterfly. And I was the butterfly.

   And though I never would have forgotten, I never would have thought, I'm not the only one to have had this dream. The butterfly fell asleep as I woke up. As we woke up. We dreamt that we were butterflies. The butterflies dreamt they were us. And to this day I still can't figure out...

   whether I was Zhuangzi dreaming... or Zhuangzi was me.