I was a child when I dreamed I turned into a toy train. Not a big, real train – just a small toy one. I was stuck in a garden with a white fence around it. What I remember most is the sadness. I knew I would never be human again.

Now I’m 43, and I still can’t shake that dream. Recently, I picked up a Russian edition of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” and something clicked. I’d read it before, but this time was different. The story of Gregor Samsa waking up as a giant bug suddenly connected with that old dream of mine. Not about bugs, but about that same scary idea – being trapped in a body that’s not human anymore.

The garden in my dream wasn’t huge or special. Just a normal garden with a white fence. But being a toy train there felt like being in jail. I could only move in straight lines, back and forth, like trains do. No running. No jumping. No hugging. Just rolling on invisible tracks forever. Reading “The Metamorphosis” in Russian, I found new layers in Gregor’s confined existence that echoed my childhood fears.

Think about that for a minute. I wasn’t scared of monsters or falling or the dark. I was scared of losing what makes us human. Pretty heavy stuff for a kid’s dream, right?

This is exactly what draws me back to Kafka. His stories dig into these deep fears we all have. Not the usual fears, like spiders or heights. He writes about the fear of losing ourselves, of changing into something else, of being stuck.

My dream had its own little twist though. Gregor became a bug, but I became a toy train. A bug is alive, at least. But a toy? That’s something made in a factory. Something that can only do one thing, over and over. Maybe that was my child-brain working out fears about growing up, about being forced into one way of living.

The white fence in my dream feels important now. It wasn’t scary by itself. White fences usually make you think of nice homes and safe places. But in the dream, it was different. It meant I couldn’t escape. Like Gregor’s room, it was both shelter and prison. I was just a toy train in a garden, watching real life happen somewhere else.

Reading Kafka in Russian has stirred up these old memories. It’s strange how a childhood dream can suddenly shed new light on a story I thought I knew. Sometimes it takes years – and another look at a good book – to understand what our dreams were trying to tell us. Sometimes a toy train isn’t just a toy train. And a bug isn’t just a bug either.

Maybe that’s the real power of Kafka – how he makes us look back at our own metamorphoses, big and small, real and imagined, and see them in a new light.