By Clara Becktold, TIWP Student

After winter break ended, I dreamt that I was already at high school graduation. My childhood was officially over, and all my classmates and I were ready to go out into the world and live our lives as adults. I remember thinking, “How could this be? Just yesterday, it was winter break… of sophomore year.”

In dreams, everything is wrong, as if whoever wrote them didn’t have enough background information so they just made up some of reality’s details and never had it fact-checked. But since you’re just a false version of yourself, you accept everything as if it were completely normal, even when it defies all laws of what is real. So even though we were adults, we sat cross-legged in a circle on the floor and waited expectantly for the teacher to give out Oreos; one per-person, unless, of course, we had enough for everyone to get seconds. And even though we were adults, we were smaller than the teacher, and we were so much younger too. We were kids, probably in about third grade or so. And yet we were graduating high school. Of course, all of this was completely normal until I woke up.

When I got home from school, my six-year-old brother told me about a walk he went on with our dad. They went up a hill and saw snow, which, even in the dream, was extremely rare in Berkeley, California. “No fair!” I told him, and I demanded my dad take me there too.

On the walk there, my hand was in his, and my head was so close to the ground. The street was wide and the houses were enormous. But when my father lifted me up so I could see the sunset over the rooftops, I felt like a queen looking down on the world, a queen who rode on the shoulders of a god.

When I woke up, it took a few seconds to come back to reality and remember that I was not, in fact, an eight-year-old child graduating high school, and that it is not a normal thing that happens for everyone. But I also realized that parts of my dream were real.

Growing up hadn’t really bothered me before, but now I cried thinking about how I would never feel the same way as I did then, when I was so small that the world seemed infinite. Dreaming of being a child had brought back hundreds of memories, now reduced to blurry images or even just feelings from the past. Back then, I wasn’t any smaller than I am now; everything and everyone was just way bigger. I wasn’t any dumber or any younger either; everyone else was just extremely old and wise. My parents were like gods to me. They knew everything there is to know, and they could never possibly be wrong. They had never been born, never been young; they had existed forever before me. And most of all, they could protect me from anything and everything. As long they were close, no harm could ever come my way for all of eternity. Death didn’t exist. There was no problem that couldn’t be solved or forgotten about and the only scary things in life were physical. That is how it felt to be young.

I had forgotten all of that. But now that I remember, I can compare it to how it is now and it hurts. Now I fear the things that nobody can protect me from. My parents are no longer gods, all-knowing, or even sources of protection. They’ve shrunken down to my level, and I can see their flaws and their struggles. Now they’re human like me. Nothing lasts forever the way it used to. The world makes too much sense now, it follows rules, it’s predictable, limited, and boring.

The only reason any of this change felt okay was because I didn’t even realize it was happening. If it had happened all at once, it would’ve been absolutely devastating.