Equilibrium
In this seemingly endless stream of days, each one so much alike the other that they blur into one continuous stream of morning, mid-day, afternoon, evening, night, it seems that my ability to experience the profoundly different, life-altering, shocking, inebriating and even intellectually challenging aspects of life have been eliminated. Every day is just like the one that came before, and tomorrow will surely be just like today. There are minor differences. Weekends come and go, each day we venture out to a different venue, we visit with different people. But the essential nature of each day is exactly the same.
It seems that my brain, faced with the prospect of drowning in homogeneity, has come up with a clever solution. While my days are like a series of nearly identical beads strung together, my dreams at night are exuberantly vibrant, full of adventure and always different every night. I dream clearly of people I have not seen or heard from in years, I go places that don’t exist in my waking reality, I experience emotionally things I have not yet really begun to think of in my daily life. During the day I struggle to find the time and mental space to compose a necessary email and have almost given up wrestling with the thought of writing creatively, but at night my dreams are full of powerful metaphors that cast my daily struggles in a new, more lucid light.
Perhaps an example will help illustrate what I mean…
Daytime = “Beatrice, eat your beans. NO BITING! Find a calm game to play with Claire. Come wash your hands.”
Nighttime = I am in a strange apartment that has been taken over by renegades and robots, and I am trying to protect Beatrice and find a safe passage through this place. I need to make sure she won’t be harmed by the Frankenstein-like robot that the renegades are bringing to life with a violent charge of electricity.
Dream decoded = It is my goal to protect Bea from the misuse of power, both protecting her from the misuse of power by us, her parents, and by making sure she herself doesn’t have more power than she can wield safely.
Sometimes I wonder what my brain would come up with if I had more time to focus on creative writing during the day. Would all that creative energy that is currently going into my dream life be re-routed into my writing? Or is the daily blandness somehow necessary for charging up that creative essence?
