When I was four years old I had a dream, it went like this:
In a world not dissimilar to our own, the Tiny Teddy race lives together in harmony. There is a small village in Tiny Teddy land, a nameless yet very important village indeed, where The Well of Life stands at the top of a grassy hill. From chocolate to vanilla Teddies, everybear is created in the magical water of the well. There is no discrimination in their world and everybear feels just as worthy and special as the next. There are no girls or boys, and everybear loves every other bear equally (when I was little, I thought that the only difference between girls and boys was the length of our hair and that you married someone (a girl or a boy, didn’t matter) to make them happy, and also that princesses always married princes in the Disney films I watched simply because the ‘video makers’ wanted a gender even cast, so that there was an evenly fair number of boys and girls in every movie. So Snow White didn’t make much sense to me: there were so many male dwarves but they made her love interest a boy as well and Snow White was obviously a girl but her hair was short! Oh the confusion of that film.)
This Utopian world of small eatable bears is seemingly perfect, the sun is always shining (there sun doesn’t melt them at all), the apple tree next to The Well of Life is always producing ripe apples (which they don’t eat, but hey, it looks nice), the Well itself has never been even slightly defaced and its silver bricks shine down upon the village below at all times. But, like in all worlds, there is a place in this village where Teddies can get hurt. This place is called The Pub.
At the bottom of Well Hill, in the quite, peaceful village below, The Pub is always looming, just waiting for Teddies to enter. When everything is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong, where can a bear find fun? You see, it is an error of every world that we always want more than what we’ve got. That is why the Teddies were persistently curious to visit The Pub, even though they knew of the dangers.
One by one, Teddies of all shapes and flavours walked down the narrow steps to the dark underground of The Pub. No one ever knows what goes on down there, but when the Teddies finally emerge they are not happy. They are always missing at least one limb. Out came a chocolate Teddy with no left ear, a vanilla Teddy with no right leg and a chocolate chip Teddy with no arms at all! Oh, the sad faces on the little Teddies were utterly heart breaking.
Supporting each other in anyway they were capable of, they made there way across the bridge and up the hill to The Well. It was only together, as a team, that they made it to the top. One by one, they rubbed The Well’s water onto the crumbling patches of cookie where their leg, arm or ear used to be. Their limbs magically reformed, leaving them whole once again.
Fourteen years later and I still remember this dream like I dreamt it only last night. My subconscious seems to hold it in my memory as if it’s the most import dream I’ll ever have. I’d never told anyone this dream before, until last night, when I suddenly felt it appropriate to tell my dad. This is what he said:
“This is a good dream. It’s nice. It isn’t a bad dream. Even though the Teddies got themselves hurt they were all better in the end. There’s always a way to make things better, when things change for the worst they can always be put right again. When you were little you had a happy view of the world, you knew bad things happened but you always knew that they could be made good again.”
And so I’ve come to the revolutionary conclusion that my four-year-old self subconsciously knew that I would need to revisit this dream in the future, that it would be comforting when I was older. Why else would I remember this one little dream? I dream a lot, but I don’t usually remember dreams from years ago. This dream is special, but I never knew why. Now I know (once again) that when I feel like I’m missing a limb, all I need to do is go to The Well of Life and make things better. The Well of Life is always there, so I’ll try not to forget about it again.
