Breathing in Ghosts: A Dream of Power and Consequence
Some dreams slip through your fingers the moment you wake, dissolving into daylight before you can hold onto them. Others linger. They settle into your bones, whispering questions long after you’ve opened your eyes.
I had a dream once. One of those dreams.
In it, I sat with my sensei, the air between us heavy with unspoken truths. He leaned in, his voice low, measured. You’re ready, he said. I can share this with you now.
He told me of ghosts—not the wailing, vengeful kind of stories and superstition, but the lost ones, the ones who remained because they could not remember how to leave. Spirits, trapped in endless forgetting.
And then he told me the secret.
There is a way to breathe them in. To consume them. To take their essence into your own body, absorbing their energy, their lost fragments of existence. It is a terrible power. One that should only be used in the direst of circumstances. With it, I could summon strength beyond my limits, overcome any foe. But in doing so, the ghosts would be no more. No passage to another world. No second chances. Just silence.
I tell you this because I believe you have the wisdom to use it wisely, my sensei said.
And then I woke.
And I wondered.
Because even if you accept that these spirits are no longer who they once were, is it right to take them in? To consume them so completely that they cease to exist on any plane? Would the power be worth the cost?
It is one thing to wield a sword, another to become one.
In stories, power always comes with a price. The hero is given a gift—Excalibur, a ring, a whispered incantation—but the question is never What can you do with it? The question is always What will it take from you? And what will you become when you use it?
I woke from the dream feeling that weight. Not of power, but of choice. The moral dilemmas of imaginary abilities, the what ifs that follow you into waking life.
But then, isn’t that the nature of dreams? To show us possibilities, even the ones that make us uneasy? To make us question what we would do if we had the strength of gods, the knowledge of ancient warriors, the power to unmake the things that haunt us?
Perhaps the dream was never about ghosts at all.
Perhaps it was about the things we carry—the old selves, the lost memories, the burdens we’ve never fully set down. Perhaps it was asking: What do we consume? And what, in turn, consumes us?
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