Promises to People Who Only Exist in Dreams
I promised her I would write the letter she needed, swore I would meet her at the train station on Thursday, committed to helping her find the lost music box that contained her mother’s voice. But she existed only in my dream, a creation of my sleeping mind so vivid and compelling that I woke up feeling guilty for promises I could never keep to someone who had never existed.
The weight of phantom contracts is real even when the contractors are imaginary. The dream people to whom we make commitments feel as deserving of our loyalty as any person we’ve met in waking life, sometimes more so because they appear in moments when our guard is down, when we’re more generous with promises than practical consideration would allow.
In dreams, I become someone more willing to help, more eager to commit, more confident in my ability to solve other people’s problems. The dream version of myself makes promises the waking version wouldn’t dare, commits to timelines the conscious mind knows are impossible, offers assistance I don’t actually know how to provide.
But the guilt upon waking is genuine—not because I’ve failed real people but because I’ve failed my own capacity for generosity, my own willingness to help, my own better nature that emerges when practicality isn’t standing guard. The dream people represent the part of myself that wants to be useful, needed, capable of making a difference in others’ lives.
Maybe the phantom contracts reveal something important about the promises I don’t make in waking life—the help I don’t offer because it’s inconvenient, the commitments I avoid because they’re risky, the generosity I withhold because it might be taken advantage of. The dream self who promises everything exposes the waking self who promises too little.
The people who don’t exist somehow make me more aware of the people who do exist but to whom I haven’t offered what I freely gave to figments of imagination. If I can promise a dream stranger that I’ll write their letter, why can’t I promise a real friend that I’ll be there when they need me?
Tonight I carry the weight of phantom contracts not as guilt for impossible promises but as inspiration for possible ones, recognizing that the generosity I show to dream people reveals the generosity I could show to real people if I were willing to be as brave while awake as I am while sleeping.
