There’s something about this time of year, something about going outside at night and just standing out there in the cold and dark, as the wind sneaks around the trees as if its playing a game of hide and seek with the night. Sometimes I’ll look up and notice how much clearer the sky looks, in a much bolder black and better contrasted dots of seemingly infinitely distant nuclear fusion, and I just feel removed. Much like the stars themselves, while I gaze upon them they seem so calm and serene, but when distance is no longer a buffer they burn and erupt with unimaginable intensity, I feel the same way about myself. It is almost as if I step outside and by using the lifeless feel of the cold air, I can illustrate an outline of myself in my head. I can close my eyes and see this tiny being standing outside and alone. I can look at him and understand how much he is feeling at the moment, because when you can place yourself in such a place, you really can only feel. I stand there, and at the same time feel that the world, in its own way is dying, yet simultaneously that the world is so full of life and wonder.
So I go back inside; bring back the noise. Perhaps it is too much to handle.
Traditionally, my dreams have never been very direct. They have always been extremely vivid, intricate abstractions of a million various thoughts and feelings, but rarely direct. Rarely would I ever believe, upon waking up from one of my many memorable dreams, that I could say, “Yeah, that one was definitely derived from being stressed out about accidentally throwing my dad’s hat off of the parking lot shuttle in Disney World.” Or anything to that effect. If my dreams were a crime scene, there would be no patterns, no tangible evidence, but if you could harness yourself and hover above the room, the mess of the whole thing would reveal itself as some sort of M.C. Escher meets Picasso meets Salvador Dali type of bloody, catastrophic painting. I’ve asserted it before, and I will again, in most cases, I believe that my dreams have served as some sort of creative medium. I sleep. I dream. I wake up. I have experienced and seen images of a constructed world which does not exist. I connect this with my waking thoughts. In an ancestorial fashion, somewhere down the road, the seeds of these visions comes out in some sort of self-expression. This process reciprocates. I have two distinct consciousnesses, one waking, one sleeping. The combination of the two seems to fully construct who I am.
Lately, things are different. An error has popped up in the system. I’ve been having tangible dreams, on a very frequent basis. Sometimes I go to sleep feeling paranoid, lost and beyond the point of desperation. When I wake up, I feel driven, determined and like I’ve arrived at the point beyond hope– assurance because I am able to do something about ‘it’. Sometimes the cycle is the opposite, and I wake up feeling how I did before I went to sleep the other night and vice versa.
These dreams I have– these dreams are so terrifying. I’ve been invaded. The invaders are fools though. They are the clever cat hiding behind the somewhat translucent curtain.–
I can see you there, you know?
— These dreams are still in their vivid, intricate and impossibly abstract settings, but its all just a smoke screen. Immediately they are given away. In the settings are the things that must be haunting me. People, events, experiences that all happened and were very real pervade these elaborately constructed sets. Filth, I call it– and like some sort of terrible sludge monster terrorizing the perfectly imperfect surroundings of human order and urbania, I wake up and have no trouble following the slimy, grimy and detestable path around the block to memories that are the same relative distance in time.
Lately, my life has changed a lot. I am no longer suspended. I am not fastened into any type of bracing. If I could fly, then I could fly anywhere my heart desired, but I am no where near flying, so I am just free falling.
I left the system that I so vitally depended on. We tend to hand over our lives, in their entirety, and tell entities other than ourselves to take care of them. Cultivate them, incubate them, this is my investment, making it into something more. Maybe I just realized I wasn’t getting anything more out of it. Maybe it wasn’t so much the thought that if I took my investment of self back that I could get more than I could get within the system, but more like, if I don’t get myself back, there won’t be any of myself left worth having.
If you ask me why I am not in school anymore, well, then that would probably be the best I could offer. Not much of an explanation, maybe, but I am not gifted enough, in words, to do any better.