Lately, I have been sleeping more than usual. Not out of laziness, not from exhaustion either. But because sleep is a place where I feel held. Not by any real arms, but by the strange, soft architecture of dreams.
Dreams are where I meet people I have lost.
They come quietly. Sometimes they speak. Sometimes they just sit beside me. They never ask why I am there. I never ask them how they returned. But there’s a peace in those moments a warmth that real life, in its busyness, rarely gives.
I have met my grandfather again in these dreams. The man who once peeled oranges on the terrace in winter afternoons. I can still see the way his fingers worked, slowly, patiently. The smell of orange peel in the sun. The way he handed me the neatest slice without asking. I have lived that moment again in dreams. Not just remembered it, but lived it.
Sometimes I don’t even need to be asleep. I drift into daydreams as if my mind takes a detour. I start watching my life from the outside as though it were a film, and I am not the lead actress but a quiet spectator. Detached, soft-eyed, sitting in a dim theatre as memories flicker across a screen.
In one scene, I am five years old. I am sitting on my father’s chest while he lies on the bed. I bounce on it with joy, no idea what pain or distance or silence would grow between us later. In that moment, I am light as a balloon. And he is just my father not a man with flaws, not a man with burdens. Just the floor beneath my laughter.
There’s a comfort in being five again. A comfort in not knowing the future.
I return to these rooms often the terrace, the bedroom, the smell of oranges, the rise and fall of a chest under a child’s weight. I return not because I am stuck in the past, but because the past holds pieces of me I don’t want to forget. Pieces of people I don’t want to let go of.
Sleep is not an escape. It is an archive. A theatre. A reunion.
And in that space between dream and wakefulness, I am not lonely. I am not broken. I am held. By memory. By imagination. By the quiet gift of remembering in detail what made me feel alive.
If there is such a thing as time travel, maybe this is it.
Not through machines, but through the mind.
Through sleep.
Through story.
Through the soft return to who we once were.
