That was how the two of us found ourselves digging through the detritus of a dreamball on a long December night.
A dreamball, for those unfamiliar, is a letter to one’s future self, balled up in clay to form a crude time capsule. Typically, they are fashioned in childhood, the letter composed of things one might wish to say to oneself at age twenty, the ball then sealed away. It’s a rather saccharine tradition.
This dreamball in particular had been fashioned by my brother-in-arms, Daiki Shikama, during his junior high school days. On a recent visit to his parents’ home, he’d discovered it among various embarrassing mementos of his past unceremoniously dumped into a cardboard box for safekeeping. The dreamball had remained unopened, Shikama having completely forgotten of its existence. Now here he was, long past the intended age of twenty, asking me to sit in as he completed the ritual, claiming that cracking the ball open on his own would offer a rather dull experience.
In truth, I suspected he wanted me there because he was frightened. Once the dreamball was open, a torrent of sentimentalism would doubtless spring forth, and Shikama was terrified of getting swept up in the current. We were brothers of a pact, having sworn off frivolities like base emotion and romantic longing, determined to live our days grounded in reality. But as children of men, we were vulnerable to assault. The mere concept of a dreamball was laden with the aroma of danger. It threatened to pierce the most sensitive regions of the soul without warning.
Imagine for a moment that you yourself are sitting down to break open a dreamball carefully crafted and stored away since adolescence. You’re alone. It’s just you and your past. The thought itself is upsetting enough to have you begging for a syringe of local anesthetic jabbed directly into your psyche. You know that if you allow the episode to sweep you away and send bittersweet tears streaming down your cheeks, you’ll be unable to forgive yourself for a quarter century hence.
Thus, when Shikama realized he’d be forced to face his past self, it was only natural that he sought my presence to act as an emotional brace. I instinctively curled my right hand into a loose fist, preparing for the worst. I was ready to wallop my friend across the room the instant his heart was seized by the talons of the past.
The dreamball was roughly the size of a softball. Across its baked white exterior was a chaotic pattern of indigo swirls. It was an eerie design, no doubt reflecting the inner turmoil Shikama had borne in adolescence.
I spread a sheet of newspaper across the tatami floor, and Shikama tossed the dreamball down with a heavy thunk.
“What if it’s so awful that I can’t even laugh it off?” he murmured.
“Have you forgotten what you wrote?”
“I think it was probably something about going to America and getting a license to fly helicopters. I mean, I was in junior high school.”
“Right. Well, let’s get to it.”
Wielding a rusty pair of pliers, Shikama began whacking the dreamball to no avail. It refused to break. It occurred to me that the dream sealed away inside must be quite steadfast. Each time Shikama raised the pliers high above his head for the subsequent blow, a fine mist of white clay danced in the air about him.
When the ball finally did split, after a great deal of effort, the surrounding tatami was littered with alabaster dust. Inside was a tiny film canister. With all the care of an archaeologist handling a rare artifact, Shikama popped the lid and extracted a torn bit of discolored paper.
I remained at his side, observing my friend’s confrontation with the sunny dreams he’d had for himself in tender adolescence. The message had been composed at age fourteen, written to an imagined self of age twenty, now read at age twenty-three. The pit of my stomach squirmed. What a godforsaken sight.
Without warning, Shikama broke into a great fit of laughter.
He roared on for some time and was gasping for breath when he finally exclaimed, “This isn’t my dream!”
Inwardly, I sighed. I understood his reaction. Who of us doesn’t long to deny the full scope of our junior high foolishness made apparent in such a dream? When confronted by our stark naked pasts, do we not all avert our eyes?
But the heights we reach today are only achieved by scrambling atop the sediment of our past failures. Just as modern civilization is powered by the remains of ancient life compressed over hundreds of millennia into oil, so too are we obliged to pump the shameful idiocy of our pasts into our engines of the soul if we wish to sally forth into the future. Doing so requires boldly coming to terms with our adolescent selves, fully bared. As indeed, without first extracting the oil buried deep underground, we could not have produced the dizzying array of plastic products now destroying the environment with such gleeful abandon.
“No, no. I’m telling you this isn’t even my handwriting.”
He thrust the discolored fragment before my eyes.
He was right. What I saw was not Shikama’s handwriting at all. And the content of the wish itself was something I could hardly imagine from him—this same friend of mine who, upon admission to the private academy in Osaka where he would spend his junior high and high school years, is said to have marched three steps forward, pointed one finger to the sky and another to the ground, and proclaimed the same words as the infant Siddhartha, “Throughout heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one.” Everything I’ve heard suggests that he followed through with that claim, too, expanding his authority until the entire student body was at his beck and call.
I read the scrap of paper aloud.
“One. Get a spot on the Kyoto University baseball team and win the triple crown. Two. Find a normal job after graduation, meet someone I get along with, and get married.”
“That’s the most boring dream I’ve ever heard!” Shikama announced.
To which I responded, “You do know this means the dreamball you’ve been looking after for nearly a decade belongs to somebody else.”
All that heroic resolution he’d mustered to square off against his past self had nowhere to go. It could only spin aimlessly inside him. I could tell at once that he was fraught with excess thoughts and adrenaline.
“I just realized what happened,” he blurted, face contorted in shock. “After we finished the project in class, we put the dreamballs on display at the school festival. When it was over, we were supposed to collect our own ball and take it home. But there were several that all looked the same, and I wasn’t sure which was mine. It must have gotten mixed up with someone else’s. Good god! Whose dream do I have? Which one of my classmates wrote this drivel?!”
Now he was ranting furiously, all but boiling over with rage. But in the depths of his words, I sensed a melancholy he could not dispel.
We sat like that, two young men uncertain what to do, shivering in a rapidly chilling four-and-a-half-mat room on a dark winter night, clutching the wish of an unknown third party that was already several years past its expiration.
“How can this be?” muttered Shikama forlornly. “I’ve lost my dream.”