I keep having this series of recurring nightmares. Nightmares where the phrase "All men are created equal" is more than just a foundation; it's an ultimatum. In one of my dreams, I wake up in a room with scores of others. We all file together in to a large hall and sit at long tables. We are taught material that we have been taught every day. I whisper complaints to my fellow students, and they tell me to hush. I understand the material; there are others in the class who do not. The teachers have told me that it does not matter that I am smarter. They tell me I should sympathize with the other students. That they mean more to them than me because of their disabilities. They tell me I should stop being so selfish, and that the other students are more important than I am. They lash me for my selfishness. They punish me for being intelligent. The other students scoff at me because I want special treatment for being smart. "Who do you think you are?" they ask me. "What makes you so great? You're just lucky that you're so smart. Why can't you sympathize for the ones who aren't as fortunate? Don't you see they need more attention than you?" They tell me to stop performing so well, and maybe I won't feel like I need special treatment. The school cares more for the unintelligent than me. Tells me it doesn't have time for anomalies like me.

In another one, I am older. I have been placed into a job I am overqualified for. My coworkers tell me to stop complaining. Other people need the better jobs more than I do. "So give them more pay," I cry. "Pay them more, but let me think..." They tell me my brain is useless, that if ideas come so easily to me that I am worthless. They tell me I should put it to use, that I should spend my time teaching others how to think like me. "Why?" I ask. "I know how to think. Let me put it to use. Why waste my time in teaching others when I can spend the time myself and accomplish more than they could?" They tell me to stop being so selfish. They tell me that by doing the job myself, I would be putting other people out of jobs. “Why is that my problem?” I ask. “Why should I worry about them when I have myself to worry about? My own mind? My own ideas? My own life?” Stop being so selfish, they tell me. What makes you think your life is so important? Because it’s mine, I try to tell them. It is my life, it is my mind, it is my health, they are my ideas, it is my self! But they don’t listen. The survival of the community comes before my own selfish desires, they tell me. They ask why I don’t think about someone else for a change.

I meet a man in another dream. He is beautiful; like none I have ever seen before. His smile is golden. He tells me he must not love me, that there are other women who need his love more than I. Other women who are not as beautiful, women who are unfortunate and have homely faces and portly bodies. He tells me that by all standards, he should have pity on them and love them more. “By whose standards?” I ask. These are not my standards. The standards of the community, he tells me. Anyone can love a beautiful woman, he tells me, but only a truly righteous man can love a more unfortunate woman. After all, it is not her fault she is so homely. He asks how I can be so selfish and ask for his love over all of these other women. After all, he says, it is not their fault they are not as smart as I am. They just had a stroke of bad luck. What virtue is there in loving a smart, beautiful woman who had the world handed to her on a platter? I don’t have the world, I try telling him. Nobody will give the world to one such as I, because I am beautiful, because I am smart. Stop being so selfish, he tells me. He asks, who are you to think so highly of yourself?

In a dream taking place years later, I have a child. The child is beautiful and brilliant, like his mother. He is a bastard; the product of a pure desire his mother and father will never admit to their society. Everyone believes his father died the wedding night. We know his father still exists, right under their noses. My child is punished at school for being at the head of his class. The teachers ask who he is that he thinks he’s the most important. The other students scoff at him, too, and tell him to stop being so smart. He comes home, crying, every day, asking why. Why he is forced to suppress his brain, his mind, his life. I tell him it is the product of a world that begs equality. Too few people flourish when only a select few are as intelligent as he and I. But why is that our problem? He asks. Why should we have to worry about everyone else? Shouldn’t the first person I care about be myself? Shouldn’t my first concern be my own well being? I tell him these are suicidal thoughts. He tells me he does not care if it is suicide; he cares only that I agree with him. I tell him I do, and it makes him happy.

There is no happiness in my dreams, save for my little boy. I wake up to each in horror, knowing that if such a world were to exist, I could not live to bear it.