An issue of some importance...

This is not something that is very easy to write about, so you will have to be patient. In all honesty, it is not only something very close to my heart, but something very far removed from what, and who, I really am. I do not ask that you understand, I only ask that you listen.

These last few months, I have had dreams of a particular kind. Rather than being the kind of which I have written several times before, these are of a whole nother kind. I may, at times, have mentioned the concept on which they are based; false nostalgia, but lately they have gone from being a source of amusement and fascination to being a horror all of its own.

They are not, as one might think, visions of the way one's own supposed past would look like through the eyes of who one is now. I do not enter them with the mindset of one who has seen many things come and go since the events transpired, and matured in more ways than one. Were you to, at any point, go back and observe key moments of your childhood, you would not find the same awe and grandeur today that you did as a child. The world was a larger and much more impressive place back then.

No! Instead I step into them feeling every bit of the same awe and inspiration as I, supposedly, did when I first experienced them. Joys are as joyful, and enjoyment is just as enjoyable. When I wake up, I do so with a great sorrow in my heart, the kind of sinking feeling one can only get from watching the things one had loved fade away slowly, you being completely unable to do anything about it.

It would not bother me nearly as much were it not for the fact that the visions are not real. They are lies! Deception! But at the time, they felt so vivid, so real. The emotions I felt were not lies, the happiness was genuine, as was the despair that followed.

As I am writing this, the words themselves are fading. How do I describe what I saw?

There was a beach, or rather an entire campground. I was a boy, who's to say how old? My parents were both there, I remember my father particularly fondly. Maybe he had to pay some fee, I don't know. We were all bathing; me, my siblings, even one of my uncles was there.

But there was more to it than that. I made mistakes. There was an elevator that was supposedly out of order, and I feared it. For some reason it descended with a particular type of small figurine set of toys that I loved so when I was a young boy, but I wasn't supposed to have them, and the elevator was not supposed to move.

We all played in the water for a long time. My father, or maybe my uncle, made such a huge splash jumping from a little height that all the water temporarily receded from the lake, but slowly crept back again.

Truth be told, it was our house that lay on the beach of that small lake. It was ours alone, it belonged to no one else. It was my sanctuary, I could go back there and it would belong to us forever.

There were also some kind of camp meetings, and I reminisced about them to one of my cousins, who was also there.

From there, things went wrong. My brother, or perhaps it was my sister, got stuck on the boardwalk outside of the house, then all faded in a particularly strange way. It was not as if an image faded from a paper, it was more like a room of imagination you were in was being gradually razed to reveal reality outside of it's walls.

I cried. I walked from room to room in our house, and it was bigger than I had previously thought. I could not find where my parents slept, and I had done something very wrong. I cried, through it all. All was lost, it was just a fantasy. The scene I had enjoyed so was just part of a dead past that would never ever come back. Our front door no longer was there, because it was no longer our house, it belonged to someone else. I had no sanctuary anymore. I cried.

There was a kite, that I got to fly, and some kind of mechanical plane. They were the last vestiges of the past that I clung to in the hopes of spending just a few more moments in that blessed realm.

When I awoke, it was all gone, it had faded into a strange story of danger and action, but none of that mattered. My childhood was dead forever, and the dream had only afforded me a brief joy just to shatter me with the sorrow that it was all gone.

The dream was not real, but the feelings it left me with were.

Please, I want to go back there...please...