Monday, June 16, 2008

dreams

I should probably pay more attention to my dreams. It isn't like they are subtle. I've always been one of those people who dreams intensely. I know that supposedly we only dream for a few hours each night, but I have a hard time believing it. I've always felt like dreaming from eyes shut to wide awake was the way my body functioned. This may of course simply be perception, but there are times that I wonder.

I usually dream vividly, though I can't always recall the dreams themselves. I can usually recall the associated emotions, be it joy or terror or frustration or whatever. It can be disorienting to wake with an underlying intense emotion that is completely disconnected from your surroundings. Even more disorienting though is when the emotion isn't entirely inappropriate to the situation, but was somehow connected to it in the dream, like when I dreamed I've had a discussion the night before with the first person I see the next morning, which had in the dream been heated and I find myself sitting across from my roommate trying to reconcile my feelings that one of us should apologize to the other with their apparent complete obliviousness to what takes me a few groggy minutes to realize was all in my head.

Sometimes I can remember bits of my dreams and understand that they are telling me something. I knew needed to get out of my desk job when I would wake to realize that I had spent the entire night frustratedly databasing. I didn't like doing it in the day time; I really hated doing it throughout the night. Right now my dreams aren't screaming for me to find a new job, but they are stretching out and feeling around at different jobs. From last night's dream I can take away that I need to get back to diving and perhaps make moves which allow me to maybe move towards more adventurous employment. When I write "more adventurous" from my bunk on a boat in the middle of the ocean, I think I also mean more entertaining. There is a certain adventurousness to working on a boat in the middle of the ocean, but on the other hand it can also be amazingly boring. I'm required by my job to NOT take risks. Maybe trying more aggressively to get on board for collecting trips and maybe see if I can get my foot in the door with adventure film-making or something like that. Oddly enough, the other extreme that I see as a possibility is making this damn written word pastime into employment somehow. How, i have no idea, since writing is one of those things that I fiercely guard from outside encroachment. The opposite of guarding something is selling it.

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