Are My Dreams Glimpses Into Parallel Realities?

Written By Alex Yamada

Content Warnings: minor mentions of violence and night terrors

Parallel realities exist beyond our eyes
I wonder how my parallel selves are doing?
Surely they’ve made better choices than I
sometimes dream, and wonder if those are little
windows into their lives

My day dreams are
pleasant and kind I imagine
becoming a famous writer, accepting
some award, not an Oscar, no, a smaller award for
my work, something more achievable
and work my way up to an Oscar for a script
or maybe becoming a painter and have galleries in LA
with beautiful and haunting pieces some reviewer calls “Wonderful”
Even though I haven’t touched a brush in ages
Or being a fashion designer
Beautiful dresses made of fine fabric with exquisite drapery
Made for the every day and for the red carpets
Just because the me of this reality
can’t sew worth a damn, doesn’t mean the other me can’t
I’m sure the other me’s have mastered all kinds of skills by now

But I don’t dream at night much anymore, not since my youth
I don’t know what crimes my parallel selves have done
to earned being shot, stabbed, tortured by
shadowy demonic figures who laugh
at my suffering, who delight when
I struggle to wake up in a sweat
While those nightmares no
longer plague my nights
I can’t help but wonder
If that means all my
parallel selves
are all

Dead.

Alex Yamada

Alex Yamada is a gay man who has experimented with several mediums including painting and photography before settling into writing. He writes mainly poetry, short stories, and more recently, screenwriting.

Alex began writing in high school. After years of bullying in middle school, he found releasing his anger and sadness in poetry to be cathartic, while the teachers often found it concerning, earning his mom a few phone calls. It wasn't until community college in a film studies class that he realized that writing for TV and movies is also a profession. So he started his journey of teaching himself screenwriting, with Microsoft Word no less.

He tends to write on the darker side of humanity; pain, sadness, the demons people wrestle with. These are feelings he grew up with and is comfortable exploring, but he's capable of gallows humor, and a sort of sarcastic wit at times as well. While not everyone appreciates a morbid humor, he knows he's not everyone's cup of tea.

When he does dip back into photography, Alex mainly photographs nature and manipulates the photos into something more whimsical.

Alex has been featured in his community college literary magazine, MSJC's Flight, and at UCR's own Mosaic magazine. His first screenplay Echoes was about a psychic homicide detective. While that's been through a few drafts and incarnations, it is currently shelved, but maybe someday will be revised again, and maybe even make it to a studio for a pitch meeting.

Alex is currently part of an indie short film group that mainly focuses on science fiction. While a bit outside of his usual scope of writing, it's not entirely alien to him. He is currently working on the second draft of a sci-fi romcom (despite having very little experience writing romance or comedy), and could possibly lead to his first film credit!

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