Personal Essay by Rafael Andres Jennings
Every night for about a month I took Benadryl before laying my head on my pillows. Sometimes I would take two and sometimes I would just take one, but I always made sure that I had my nightly Benadryl. Despite walking around the next few days under heavy eyelids or experiencing semi-common headaches, the luxury of a heavy sleep outweighed the side effects.
To be stuck in the world of my dreams was what I craved. I found the answer when I looked up ‘How to have vivid dreams’, scrolling past Melatonin (I did not have any) and Tumeric (again did not have any) and landed on Benadryl. An image stroked my mind of the pink packet that sat tucked behind the multivitamins in my mother’s cabinet.
For weeks, as the plastic shells popped pink pills out of them deflating their bubblegum exterior, I consumed the vivid dreams that I yearned for. Each day, until there were no more pills, I found myself bits closer to escaping the world around me, hoping to be submerged completely into my dreams.
When I am awake, I feel overwhelmed questioning the things that I am made of. I can ground myself in a few facts:
My name is Rafael Andres Jennings, and I was born in Bogota, Colombia.
The rest is subject to change.
In the highlands of Colombia, the Wayuu people use their dreams as a bridge to reality. Like many cultures, they use their dreams as communication from their Gods. Through dreams, they receive guidance, diagnosis, and connection to the dead. Dreaming reifies the existence of two worlds, bridging them to form an importance that hinges on belief and trust.
Blood-curdling screams filled my infant throat every night for a few years. My parents would peer into my crib looking into wide eyes with nothing behind them. “I thought you were possessed” my mother would tell me years later. The thought of a foreign-born child coming to America just to scream through the night scares me as well. A demon from the third world. Although I have no recollection of this supposed possession, I do remember the visions that would haunt my sleep before I went to bed. From under blankets, my eyes would watch the trees outside of my windows watching as they talked to me. Leaves swaying in the form of faces yelling at me, and shadows in the midnight sky that looked like creatures decorating the sky. For me, the point of final sleep became the escape from the real world. A real world that ran me to my dreams between nightly prayers. When I woke up, I would thank God for gifting me the remedy of sleep each night.
Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is famous for carving out a genre of literature through his use of traditional Colombian methods of storytelling. Magical Realism has become synonymous with the culture of Latin America and more specifically the historical struggles of Latin American people. Dreams in his stories play the roles of superstitions and premonitions. Furthermore, Dreams in the life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez were so important that they became recurring appearances in his novels. In many ways, dreams cannot be questioned, they are the stories that they are. Are they always understood? No, but at their base they are separated from their interpretation. Sometimes, the struggle to make sense of Magical realism is what ruins the beauty of the world that it writes. Arguably the most famous world of Magical Realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude, has been criticized for all the sense it doesn’t make. When I watched the television program, Narcos, for the first time, a quote plastered itself across my screen and stuck with me.
“There is a reason Magical Realism was born in Colombia, It’s a place where the bizarre shakes hands with the inexplicable daily.”
A dream-like place, I thought.
Houses painted the colors of Carnaval shadow the streets run by vendors selling sugar-drenched lemonade, and God molded roses. My mother would tell me stories of Cartagena as if she could still feel the Caribbean sunbeams on her face. My Pinterest is filled with pictures of Cartagena, Cali, Medellin, and Bogotá places I’ve never been but my blood traces me back to. When my cousins, Colombian adoptees, like me, planned their trip back to Colombia I remember the jealousy that I felt. My mother’s face was lit by the television as I stood in front of her bed and finally broke the ice.
“Why can’t we go to Colombia?”
“Because it's too expensive. You’ll get there one day.”
“Okay.”
As I sat in my room looking at the prices of flights and planning a budget from 200 dollars to my name, I remembered the Annual fundraisers for my Orphanage. All the country club families talked about their plans to visit Colombia, their VIP tables and thousands of dollars in donations, and even though I’d been around them my whole life the realization that we are not the same didn’t strike me until I was about 15. My face turned thinking about the one thing that stood between me and my country, green paper. Going to sleep that night I prayed as I always did, listing all of the things I was grateful for, with the guilt of knowing how much more I wanted. A connection I thought I deserved.
In the short story, I Sell My Dreams, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian woman who immigrated to Austria as a child, learns the art of dream interpretation. Giving up her dreams of becoming a singer, she devoted her life to interpreting the dreams of herself and others. This skill brings security to her actions through the support of another realm.
The heat of a Syracuse Spring boiled my sweat as I walked home crying. From the University to my house was only a 30-minute walk that felt shorter under the green sun-brushed trees. On the day I went down, an influencer had graced one of the off-campus bars and made what I thought was the line for five guys down the street. It was the first hot day in Syracuse and while waiting for five guys I found myself among an array of bikini-decorated bodies. I waited for 20 minutes only to get to the front and realize I was in line for the bar. I was seventeen, so I pushed back out through the sorority sisters and fraternity brothers to redirect myself to five guys. After spending far too much on a burger that lacked bacon, I walked back home to eat my food. I had wasted 3 hours walking around doing nothing. Sweat drenched my forehead, and I stopped to stand among the windless heat. “I’m so lonely”, I thought. My phone was home, but I knew no one was calling me, chatting me, or texting me. That's what brought the tears, and even though I knew exactly how I felt I had no idea how to feel about it. That night I went to sleep with tears in my eyes. In my dream, I wasn’t me, but a boy walking down Ocean Drive feeling the weight of a lump in my throat. Between mirages of the South Beach lights and Art Deco architecture, I stood dreaming. Feeling the same way, I felt in Syracuse, yet gifted with the conditions of dreaming to know that I wasn’t me. The feeling of loss permeated this state of R.E.M. I woke up to the sun through my windows trying to make sense of the dream. To me, the Miami conducted in my sleep felt like a movie. I turned to my computer and turned the dream into a short story, letting off my second world and realizing that life was full of ways to escape.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Macondo, the principal pueblo, is built from a dream. The founding patriarch’s vision of a pueblo made of mirrors materializes as the pages flip.
Another dream took me flying over a hazy Colombia, feeling my years of love for the country without being in it. When I think about why I love creative writing I think of the world I craved escape to through my dreams, the shadows that filled my room before sleeping, and their saving grace. Maybe, the way to feel alive is to touch your dreams while you’re awake.