Grief after heaven, relief from hell: waking truths
I wake from the beautiful dream with the specific grief of someone who has been evicted from paradise, mourning the loss of a world where everything was possible and nothing was wrong. But I wake from nightmares with the relief of an escaped prisoner, grateful for the bars that turned out to be imaginary, the threats that dissolved with consciousness.
This asymmetry reveals something profound about our relationship with reality: we cling to experiences that transcend our ordinary limitations while fleeing from experiences that confirm our deepest fears. Good dreams offer us versions of ourselves we wish we could be—confident, loved, capable of impossible things. Bad dreams show us versions of ourselves we’re terrified we already are—helpless, abandoned, doomed to fail at everything that matters.
The disappointment when good dreams end isn’t just about losing a pleasant experience—it’s about returning to a reality that feels impoverished by comparison. The dream where you could fly makes walking feel like imprisonment. The dream where you were effortlessly loved makes ordinary relationships feel like negotiations. The dream where problems solved themselves makes waking challenges feel impossible.
But the relief when bad dreams end is immediate and complete. The nightmare’s dissolution proves that our worst fears need not be permanent, that suffering can be temporary, that we can survive experiences that felt unsurvivable while we were having them. Waking up from a bad dream is a resurrection, a return from death, a reminder that not all dark experiences are final.
Maybe this is why we remember nightmares more vividly than beautiful dreams—nightmares need to be remembered so we can appreciate their unreality, while beautiful dreams need to be forgotten so we don’t spend our lives mourning impossible standards of happiness.
The asymmetry of awakening teaches us that we are creatures who find more pain in losing heaven than joy in escaping hell, more sorrow in the end of transcendence than relief in the end of suffering.
Tonight I practice gratitude for both kinds of awakening—the gentle sadness that proves I can imagine better, and the profound relief that proves I can survive worse.
