Serena Patel

This was the essay prompt for the University of Chicago. I had no desire to actual attend the school, but I was intrigued by their prompts.
Essay Option 3: Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, ‘Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.’ Give us your guess.

“You know that place between sleep and wake, the place where you can still remember dreaming?” That’s where all insanity awaits.

Under your warm blankets, with your head resting on your fluffy pillow, everything seems fine, but something is happening inside of you. Everything you’ve been doing such a good job of containing is breaking through. You start to slip into a state of semi consciousness, where you are forming dreams, but you’re not completely there. All these things ripping open inside of you is what keeps you awake. It is all the thoughts you suppress during the day. It is those thoughts that eat you away. This is the only time where you really can’t help what you think because there is nothing to distract you.

Everyone has these feelings. It is a mixture of anger toward everything that hasn’t worked out for you. It is the sadness of all that you’ve lost, or have never come to have. It might be that overbearing pain of loneliness, or the fear of what awaits you. You try to think about your math homework instead, and all the other things you failed to accomplish during the day. You try to create your own happy dream, but can’t keep a hold of it for longer than twenty seconds. So you start to analyze your life again.

Ironically, it is the happy memories that destroy you. It is the glimpse into your past to that one moment you were truly satisfied with life. It is those memories that drive you over the brink of sanity.

You think you’re going insane. You don’t realize that these thoughts in between sleep and awake truly define who you are. This person being unleashed is the one you hide during daylight. This person is you.

So when Antonio Machado wrote, “Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.” It is you. It is all the insanity within you. It is the insanity that makes an artist, an artist. It is the insanity that creates madness within a genius. It is the insanity that creates beauty in a world of ignorance. It is the insanity that arouses curiosity and thought.

And “That’s where I’ll be waiting.”

"‘Why is it so important to dream?’
‘In my dreams we’re still together.’"

— Inception

"I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do."

— Haruki Murakami

"What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?"

— Jonathan Safran Foer (via She was a Hurricane.)

Last night I had a dream that everything was back to normal.

"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."

— Neil Gaiman (via saddest-summer)

"When I wake up, I have to remember all over again that my dreams are not real and that reality is not a dream."

— Thanks for the Memories, Cecelia Ahern. (via quote-book)

"When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever."

— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (via vashti)

(Source: serialstranger, via bongjovi)

"Have you ever had a dream that felt so real that when you wake up you just want to lie there with your eyes closed and hold on to it?"

— (via She was a hurricane.)

"I dreamed I was missing, and you were so scared
But no one else listened cause no one else cared."

— Linkin Park (via She was a hurricane.)

"In dreams you don’t need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality."

— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (via vashti)

(Source: hidings, via bongjovi)

"All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories—and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought… There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse."

— Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha (via vashti)

(via bongjovi)

December 2, 2011

Do you ever have that day when something small goes wrong, and then every little thing that goes wrong after just seems like the biggest deal? Do you ever have that day when you’re just mad at the entire world and everyone in it?

I don’t even feel like sharing all the actual reasons I’m mad. I’m probably just being a drama queen, but now even the squiggly lines under a word that is misspelled or a phrase with bad grammar makes me angry because Word and dumb and doesn’t know anything. My friends and their constant change of mind annoy me. Wow, and that previous sentence is apparently grammatically incorrect. Fuck you. I’m annoyed by the fact that I’ve looked nice all week and I’ve had no one to show myself to. People who tell the stupidest lies annoy me. I’m annoyed by how some people can never take a clue. I’m annoyed by the fact that I had to reword my previous sentence just because that squiggly was so fucking annoying and ruined my train of thought. I’m annoyed by waiting for someone to do something for you, when you could have done it yourself if you knew they were never going to. I’m annoyed by the interrupted thoughts, lack of flow, and disorganization of my last letter.

My list can go on and on. I’d really like to go on, but I’m already so frustrated. People are disappointing. Life is never changing. I can throw a million of these cliché lines in, and they’d still mean nothing. I’m just tired of everything and everyone. I’m tired of the lack of character within people. I’m tired of the lack of interest in life. I’m tired of these day-by-day routines. We “plan” for the future, but I feel no progression in my present.

The only place I can rely on to be unpredictable and never disappointing are in my head. It’s when I fall into that state of semi consciousness and have little control of the situation. The only place I want to be is in my dreams. People may think I’m just lazy, but being awake holds nothing for me. As soon as I sleep, any feeling I have while awake just washes away. It’s as if these problems, hatred, annoyances, even people just don’t exist. It’s nice to wake up again after and have forgotten, or to have lost any bad feeling. I’m going to nap.

Your Friend

Note: This is a page in my story so far.