"Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me."
-- Freud
When you travel someplace new, whether it's to Southeast Asia or to the new Burger King downtown (the one that used to be a dry-cleaning place, back in the day), there's the tendency to believe that this unseen-until-now location has emerged, shining and complete, for you and you alone.
In a way, it has.
Things don't come into existence until we experience them for ourselves. You and I and President Bush and Prime Minister Martin can read about Iraq, its people and its problems, until our eyes start to fall out of their sockets, but until we go there, and talk to the people, and examine their problems, it's not real, not authentic, not solid.
The thing of it is, when we actually do go to these new places, the inverse occurs, thus completely screwing up our view of the world. Meaning, we find out: 1) That this is place has never before revealed itself to our innocent eyes; and 2) that it has, however, revealed itself to a lot of other eyes. The Burger King that is new for us, the customer, ready for a Double Whopper and fries at the opening-day sale, is most definitely not new for the fast-food manager, who has spent the past two weeks hiring teenagers, firing teenagers, hiring them again, and trying to figure out just how much ketchup is needed on a daily basis. (My estimation: a lot.)
Look at it it this way. I travel to Japan, a hick kid from Canada, and for me, each and every subway stop, not to mention buildings, elevators, even rooms, are fascinating, somewhat inexplicable adventures. For the salaryman standing next to me on the Odakyu line train as it rumbles and tumbles towards my stop, there's nothing transcendent going on. This is life, and he is living it, and his stop is just up ahead, could you kindly please step aside, thank you and I'm sorry. (Japanese are polite.)
Or I can come to Cambodia and immerse myself in a word that is poor, and corrupt, and filled with street children and teenage prostitutes. The mind reels; the jaw drops. For Cambodians? To them, um, it's Wednesday.
What is new for me is blase to you, and vice versa.
The trick of life is encountering the new, learning from it, burrowing deep, and then moving on. (Or, if you stay put, keep burrowing.) Both in Japan and Cambodia, the moment I arrived, I started reading about these completely, totally foreign places -- memoirs, biographies, history books, travel books. Just to make sense of the place. Just to allow myself a taste of
what these places were all about, written by people who lived there and loved them.
Freud was right. (Yeah, yeah, I know Freud doesn't need the props, but let's give credit where credit is due, shall we?) As the world gets smaller, as the Lonely Planet guidebooks continue to multiply like randy rabbits, so much of the world's mystery is being steadily, tragically eroded. Everywhere has been chronicled, examined, even blogged; everywhere has been held up to scrutiny, enjoyed, reviled. Poems have been written, books have been written, songs have been written -- about everywhere, really.
But don't despair.
Because I'm betting that there's places you haven't been. Others may have been there, yes, even poets, but you haven't.
Maybe it's Iceland. Or Germany. Or Quebec. Or St.Petersburg.
Or it might be the new Italian place, the one that your sister loved and your best friend hated. The one next to the new Burger King. The one whose door is always being held open by the smiling, pudgy owner.
They're all there, these places, so thoroughly trod upon by others and utterly uncontaminated by you. Shining. Complete.
What are you waiting for?
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
WHY CALLING IN SICK TO YOUR FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN IS THE KEY TO A HAPPY LIFE
"Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem."
-- Henry Kissinger
That's why I never liked school as a kid. Because once you start, whether it's from nursery school or pre-kindergarten or kindergarten or whenever, the train ain't stopping. Each grade is progressively more difficult than the one before it; Grade 5 is harder than Grade 6, Grade 7 is harder than Grade 8, and so on and so on, all the way up until the end of university.
And what's the reward for all of our academic all-nighters?
Real life!
That ain't right. We study, we slave, we go without Springer on a daily, even weekly basis, only to be rewarded by the reality of having to find an actual paying job in the world outside of academia.
Oh, but it doesn't stop there, either.
Once we get a job, if we're any good at it, we eventually get a better job. And what does 'better' actually mean?
More responsibility.
More workload.
More headaches.
Just a few years ago, Bush was chilling as owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, trying to figure out who to trade and who to keep. Trying to line up which beer company would sell the suds at his Texas stadium, probably. And now? Now he carries around a suitcase that contains the secret codes that can launch nuclear weapons at a moment's notice.
Think about it.
Kind of a leap in responsibility, no?
Do we want all that added pressure in our lives? (Not that we all carry around nuclear launch codes, no, but some of us do.)
Maybe yes.
Maybe our reward for all of our hard work in school and on the job is more work, work that allows us to, hopefully, challenge ourselves, achieve our potential, reach for the top and possibly cure a major disease, if we're lucky. (Or even a minor one.)
Still.
Underachievement is underrated, in my book.
And kids need to know what's coming.
I think it's incumbent on every parent to sit their child down the evening before their first day of kindergarten and say:
"Tonight is the last night of your life. Stay in the bath a little longer, play with the rubber duckie, read The Cat In The Hat one more time. I'll even let you stay up late. Because after tomorrow morning, it ain't gonna get any easier."
Or maybe it's better to keep that particular speech to yourself.
If I knew at four what I know now, I might have played sick that first day of school.
And the next, too.
And the next...
-- Henry Kissinger
That's why I never liked school as a kid. Because once you start, whether it's from nursery school or pre-kindergarten or kindergarten or whenever, the train ain't stopping. Each grade is progressively more difficult than the one before it; Grade 5 is harder than Grade 6, Grade 7 is harder than Grade 8, and so on and so on, all the way up until the end of university.
And what's the reward for all of our academic all-nighters?
Real life!
That ain't right. We study, we slave, we go without Springer on a daily, even weekly basis, only to be rewarded by the reality of having to find an actual paying job in the world outside of academia.
Oh, but it doesn't stop there, either.
Once we get a job, if we're any good at it, we eventually get a better job. And what does 'better' actually mean?
More responsibility.
More workload.
More headaches.
Just a few years ago, Bush was chilling as owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, trying to figure out who to trade and who to keep. Trying to line up which beer company would sell the suds at his Texas stadium, probably. And now? Now he carries around a suitcase that contains the secret codes that can launch nuclear weapons at a moment's notice.
Think about it.
Kind of a leap in responsibility, no?
Do we want all that added pressure in our lives? (Not that we all carry around nuclear launch codes, no, but some of us do.)
Maybe yes.
Maybe our reward for all of our hard work in school and on the job is more work, work that allows us to, hopefully, challenge ourselves, achieve our potential, reach for the top and possibly cure a major disease, if we're lucky. (Or even a minor one.)
Still.
Underachievement is underrated, in my book.
And kids need to know what's coming.
I think it's incumbent on every parent to sit their child down the evening before their first day of kindergarten and say:
"Tonight is the last night of your life. Stay in the bath a little longer, play with the rubber duckie, read The Cat In The Hat one more time. I'll even let you stay up late. Because after tomorrow morning, it ain't gonna get any easier."
Or maybe it's better to keep that particular speech to yourself.
If I knew at four what I know now, I might have played sick that first day of school.
And the next, too.
And the next...
ACCIDENTAL INSERTS
I found a photo in my desk at work. Never noticed it before. It's a man and a woman who I don't know, seated at a table I've never sat at. Strangers, in other words. They're smiling. Probably at a party. They are white and the people behind them are brown. Everybody looks like they're having a good time; everybody looks happy.
It made me feel lonely -- for me, for them, for the person who took the photo. Don't know why, really. There's something about a photo that's been abandoned that has a somewhat tragic feel to it. A photo should be in a photobook, or someone's wallet, or pinned on a fridge, next to the grocery list and little Becky's slightly skewed portrait of Granny. Not lying forgotten in a grey desk.
And who are the people in the photo? Are they married? Still together? Is one of them dead, while the other is alive, grieving? They've gone on and lived a life but this portrait of them, this piece of them, lay in a drawer in my desk, covered in dust. They've moved on, but this memory, this tactile projection, has remained static. Glimpsed only belatedly, by me, a stranger.
Whenever I look at old photos I've taken, I always notice the strangers, the people passing behind the people I've photographed. Where are all those strangers right now, those accidental inserts? Are they dead or alive? Content or miserable? Fed up with life or thrilled with the days they have left? And they don't know that they're in a photo of mine; nobody told them.
And how many photos am I in that I don't know about? Has somebody snapped a picture of me, unknowingly, aiming for their friend? Maybe somewhere in Canada, or Japan, or even Cambodia, there's a part of me -- a finger, a left foot, the back of my head -- that exists only in the corner of a stranger's photo.
Another me, incidental but still there, nonetheless.
It made me feel lonely -- for me, for them, for the person who took the photo. Don't know why, really. There's something about a photo that's been abandoned that has a somewhat tragic feel to it. A photo should be in a photobook, or someone's wallet, or pinned on a fridge, next to the grocery list and little Becky's slightly skewed portrait of Granny. Not lying forgotten in a grey desk.
And who are the people in the photo? Are they married? Still together? Is one of them dead, while the other is alive, grieving? They've gone on and lived a life but this portrait of them, this piece of them, lay in a drawer in my desk, covered in dust. They've moved on, but this memory, this tactile projection, has remained static. Glimpsed only belatedly, by me, a stranger.
Whenever I look at old photos I've taken, I always notice the strangers, the people passing behind the people I've photographed. Where are all those strangers right now, those accidental inserts? Are they dead or alive? Content or miserable? Fed up with life or thrilled with the days they have left? And they don't know that they're in a photo of mine; nobody told them.
And how many photos am I in that I don't know about? Has somebody snapped a picture of me, unknowingly, aiming for their friend? Maybe somewhere in Canada, or Japan, or even Cambodia, there's a part of me -- a finger, a left foot, the back of my head -- that exists only in the corner of a stranger's photo.
Another me, incidental but still there, nonetheless.
Monday, March 14, 2005
DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY
I will be happy when I get the job. When I pass the test. When I find my wallet. When I eat that pizza. When _____ loves me. When I go on vacation to Club Med this summer. When I buy that new couch, the blue one, the one for the living room. When I lose the twenty pounds. When Kirstie Alley loses forty pounds. When peace comes to the Middle East. When we follow Rodney King's advice and all get along. When the bumper on my Buick finally gets fixed. When the baby stops crying. When my lotto numbers fall into place, one glorious ping-pong ball at a time.
The other night I watched this British show hosted by a dude named Parkinson (unknown to me), and one of his guests was a very famous female cooking writer/host, Nigella Lawson (also unknown to me; I'm not up on my British celebrities, I guess). Apparently, her first husband had died a long and lingering death, and she married her second one less than two years later. When questioned about the British press's rather unsympathetic reaction to this turn of events, Lawson basically said: "I've always been a believer that if you get the chance to have a little happiness in your life, you have to take it, no matter where or when you are."
Which got me thinking.
(Flashback to the final episode of Cheers, where Sam tells Woody: "Thanks, Woody, you've given me something to think about there." And Woody says: "Ah, I'm sorry, Sam, I hate when somebody does that to me.")
Is happiness something to be grabbed, taken, possibly stored? Is it our human right, or a privilege?Can get we get it? Hold on to it? Is it a state of mind or an actual, physical state?
I don't know. I do know that happiness always seems to be over there somewhere -- up ahead, around the corner, second light on the right. Can't miss it.
And yet we do miss it, don't we? All the time, constantly. We think we're happy, and then the moment passes. (That moment can last for five seconds or five years, depending on the person.) We look at others thinking, I wish I were that happy, not realizing that they are looking at us and thinking the exact same thing.
Perhaps it's a class thing, this notion of 'happiness' being something we deserve, something we can wield and clutch. I don't think the poor of Cambodia think about 'happiness' all that much; they are too busy trying to survive. This is not saying that they don't want all the good things that we want. (Wow, that's a double negative sentence for you.) Of course they do. But I don't think that they put such a premium on their happiness. If they have money for today, food for today, they are happy. Genuinely, demonstrably happy. You can see it in their smiles, smiles that we've lost, or never had. If there exists the possibililty that tomorrow there will be no money, no food, well, so be it. That's tomorrow. For today, all is fine.
I'm simplifying things, I'm sure, but it just seems that we in the west crave happiness more than ever, with less and less people actually getting it. Everybody back home seems to be either drugged up or shooting up, looking for a state of medicinal, chemical bliss that will endure.
Maybe it's not supposed to endure, this happiness. Maybe those moments when we catch ourselves thinking 'I'm happy' are what happiness is all about -- an instant, a certain place in time, not directly connected to anything long-term, or even lasting. Maybe it just means recognizing that we're here, alive, breathing. Waiting for the day's twilight, and knowing that's enough.
The other night I watched this British show hosted by a dude named Parkinson (unknown to me), and one of his guests was a very famous female cooking writer/host, Nigella Lawson (also unknown to me; I'm not up on my British celebrities, I guess). Apparently, her first husband had died a long and lingering death, and she married her second one less than two years later. When questioned about the British press's rather unsympathetic reaction to this turn of events, Lawson basically said: "I've always been a believer that if you get the chance to have a little happiness in your life, you have to take it, no matter where or when you are."
Which got me thinking.
(Flashback to the final episode of Cheers, where Sam tells Woody: "Thanks, Woody, you've given me something to think about there." And Woody says: "Ah, I'm sorry, Sam, I hate when somebody does that to me.")
Is happiness something to be grabbed, taken, possibly stored? Is it our human right, or a privilege?Can get we get it? Hold on to it? Is it a state of mind or an actual, physical state?
I don't know. I do know that happiness always seems to be over there somewhere -- up ahead, around the corner, second light on the right. Can't miss it.
And yet we do miss it, don't we? All the time, constantly. We think we're happy, and then the moment passes. (That moment can last for five seconds or five years, depending on the person.) We look at others thinking, I wish I were that happy, not realizing that they are looking at us and thinking the exact same thing.
Perhaps it's a class thing, this notion of 'happiness' being something we deserve, something we can wield and clutch. I don't think the poor of Cambodia think about 'happiness' all that much; they are too busy trying to survive. This is not saying that they don't want all the good things that we want. (Wow, that's a double negative sentence for you.) Of course they do. But I don't think that they put such a premium on their happiness. If they have money for today, food for today, they are happy. Genuinely, demonstrably happy. You can see it in their smiles, smiles that we've lost, or never had. If there exists the possibililty that tomorrow there will be no money, no food, well, so be it. That's tomorrow. For today, all is fine.
I'm simplifying things, I'm sure, but it just seems that we in the west crave happiness more than ever, with less and less people actually getting it. Everybody back home seems to be either drugged up or shooting up, looking for a state of medicinal, chemical bliss that will endure.
Maybe it's not supposed to endure, this happiness. Maybe those moments when we catch ourselves thinking 'I'm happy' are what happiness is all about -- an instant, a certain place in time, not directly connected to anything long-term, or even lasting. Maybe it just means recognizing that we're here, alive, breathing. Waiting for the day's twilight, and knowing that's enough.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
THE 'SOAP BUBBLE THINGEE' THEORY OF LIFE
I once thought of writing a book called My Alternative Lives, using the conventions of space fiction, some of whose ideas are the same as those on the frontiers of physics. But the plot here would be that the lives of the doctor, the animal doctor, the farmer, the explorer would run concurrently with my life, set in other parallel universes or 'realities', continually influencing mine. As in those cases of multiple personalities, where only slowly do the personalities inside a woman or man become aware of each other, the heroine of this book -- me for argument's sake-- would slowly come to know that multiples of herself are living these other lives...
-- Doris Lessing,
Under My Skin
Aha! So Lessing voices something I've always suspected, that physicists are also now starting to toy with, this notion of parallel universes, parallel lives.
For example: Let's just say that you went to the high school downtown rather than the one closest to you. The moment, the instant you made that decision, another, divergent path of your life opened up. There was, in effect, two of you, travelling parallel paths that never meet.
But it could be more than that.
The you that chose chocolate ice cream over vanilla. The you that went to the dance versus the you that stayed home and watched Perfect Strangers. The you that decided to stay in high school a year longer because you were a young, pimple-faced, scared little kid who didn't know what to do in life (and still don't -- welcome to the club.)
What if, at each and every moment, we split, diverge, separate into alternate selves in alternate universes? This could be a comforting notion; soothing, even. It means that that which we have lost is not really lost at all, just diverted to a different stream of space and time. It means that our unfulfilled dreams have in fact, been fulfilled -- just by a different edition of ourselves.
Maybe our lives are like those soap-bubble thingees we played with as kids, where you dip the ring into the gloop, hold the hole up to your lips, and blow out the bubble. What begins as one big bubble soon, almost instantly, multiplies into more and more. All different, all originating from the same source.
And who knows? Maybe right now there's another version of myself discounting this same theory, in another blog, in another realm.
And maybe one day we'll be able to meet.
-- Doris Lessing,
Under My Skin
Aha! So Lessing voices something I've always suspected, that physicists are also now starting to toy with, this notion of parallel universes, parallel lives.
For example: Let's just say that you went to the high school downtown rather than the one closest to you. The moment, the instant you made that decision, another, divergent path of your life opened up. There was, in effect, two of you, travelling parallel paths that never meet.
But it could be more than that.
The you that chose chocolate ice cream over vanilla. The you that went to the dance versus the you that stayed home and watched Perfect Strangers. The you that decided to stay in high school a year longer because you were a young, pimple-faced, scared little kid who didn't know what to do in life (and still don't -- welcome to the club.)
What if, at each and every moment, we split, diverge, separate into alternate selves in alternate universes? This could be a comforting notion; soothing, even. It means that that which we have lost is not really lost at all, just diverted to a different stream of space and time. It means that our unfulfilled dreams have in fact, been fulfilled -- just by a different edition of ourselves.
Maybe our lives are like those soap-bubble thingees we played with as kids, where you dip the ring into the gloop, hold the hole up to your lips, and blow out the bubble. What begins as one big bubble soon, almost instantly, multiplies into more and more. All different, all originating from the same source.
And who knows? Maybe right now there's another version of myself discounting this same theory, in another blog, in another realm.
And maybe one day we'll be able to meet.
LINGERING BUSBOYS IN RESTAURANTS
The other day I received an out-of-the-blue email from an old running friend of mine from high school, Tim Ames, who I hadn't heard from since I was seventeen years old. I even remember the last time I saw him, the day I pulled out of a race at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton because my leg suddenly decided to go bonkers on me. And now here is, twelve years later, alive and well and living in western Canada, engaged to be married, doing well. He survived; I survived.
You remember that line from Stand By Me? "Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant." It's so true. When you're young, you meet people, hang out, chill, and then wham -- they're gone, and you usually never see them again, and yet they've somehow been able to carve a little gauge in your heart that, if you're lucky, turns into a scar.
There's that old saying: "There are two kinds of people in the world -- those that leave home and those that stay. The former are usually more interesting."
I agree with that sentiment, but at the same time, it doesn't really matter; if you stay, somebody's leaving, and if you leave, somebody stays behind. There's always the residue of life, its emotions and memories, left behind; there's always a kind of resonance that can still be heard and felt months, even years later. Perhaps it's nothing more than the abscence of an individual whose life intersected with yours.
We all know that growing old sucks -- nothing but work, family, crises, mortgage, retirement and, eventually, death to look forward to. (With some compensations in between, I'm
assuming.)
And yet, there are these other, more intricate layers and circuits that we are never really told about because they form part of an emotional matrix that people take for granted, not properly recognizing these pathways as the pulsing heart of our interior lives.
We are young for so short a time and old for so long (if we're lucky.) We leave behind our childhood and adolescence like candy wrappers dropped casually on a random street, because what other choice do we have, really? We can't stay in the past; our bodies and minds won't let us, and most of us wouldn't choose to to do that anyways. (Pee-Herman, maybe.)
But I think, for good or for bad, that's where we're shaped, during those first eighteen, nineteen years of life. We form views of the world based on people we've met, places we've lived in, teachers we've slept with. (I'm joking, I'm joking.) Our lives intertwine with so many others in so many small and insignificant ways -- the paper boy, the elementary school janitor, the convenience store clerk who smokes and reads Cosmo as if it's Tolstoy.
The refreshing, surprising and oddly reaffirming notion that arises when hearing from somebody who knew you when you were a kid is this: They knew us then, before all the bad and tough and confusing stuff happened. (At least, the adult version of the bad and tough and confusing stuff.) They knew you before anybody else did, and that's how they remember you, and perhaps they're your link to your younger, purer self.
Or maybe it's less dramatic than that. Maybe it's just a simple human thing, this contact with someone who shared a certain portion of your life. Maybe it's just a pleasant diversion from life's grittiness, a blast of nostalgia that could lead to a greater adult friendship, or even just goodwill, plain and basic goodwill, that will linger through the years.
I asked Tim if he knew what had happened to some of our old running buddies, and he wasn't sure; for now, they exist only as memories, even though the real world, I'm sure, has pushed them on and forward. But he said that my brother had mentioned an idea of a 'running reunion' somewhere down the line.
I hope it happens. Because we all know that even busboys in restaurants sometimes hover and linger around your table longer than expected.
You remember that line from Stand By Me? "Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant." It's so true. When you're young, you meet people, hang out, chill, and then wham -- they're gone, and you usually never see them again, and yet they've somehow been able to carve a little gauge in your heart that, if you're lucky, turns into a scar.
There's that old saying: "There are two kinds of people in the world -- those that leave home and those that stay. The former are usually more interesting."
I agree with that sentiment, but at the same time, it doesn't really matter; if you stay, somebody's leaving, and if you leave, somebody stays behind. There's always the residue of life, its emotions and memories, left behind; there's always a kind of resonance that can still be heard and felt months, even years later. Perhaps it's nothing more than the abscence of an individual whose life intersected with yours.
We all know that growing old sucks -- nothing but work, family, crises, mortgage, retirement and, eventually, death to look forward to. (With some compensations in between, I'm
assuming.)
And yet, there are these other, more intricate layers and circuits that we are never really told about because they form part of an emotional matrix that people take for granted, not properly recognizing these pathways as the pulsing heart of our interior lives.
We are young for so short a time and old for so long (if we're lucky.) We leave behind our childhood and adolescence like candy wrappers dropped casually on a random street, because what other choice do we have, really? We can't stay in the past; our bodies and minds won't let us, and most of us wouldn't choose to to do that anyways. (Pee-Herman, maybe.)
But I think, for good or for bad, that's where we're shaped, during those first eighteen, nineteen years of life. We form views of the world based on people we've met, places we've lived in, teachers we've slept with. (I'm joking, I'm joking.) Our lives intertwine with so many others in so many small and insignificant ways -- the paper boy, the elementary school janitor, the convenience store clerk who smokes and reads Cosmo as if it's Tolstoy.
The refreshing, surprising and oddly reaffirming notion that arises when hearing from somebody who knew you when you were a kid is this: They knew us then, before all the bad and tough and confusing stuff happened. (At least, the adult version of the bad and tough and confusing stuff.) They knew you before anybody else did, and that's how they remember you, and perhaps they're your link to your younger, purer self.
Or maybe it's less dramatic than that. Maybe it's just a simple human thing, this contact with someone who shared a certain portion of your life. Maybe it's just a pleasant diversion from life's grittiness, a blast of nostalgia that could lead to a greater adult friendship, or even just goodwill, plain and basic goodwill, that will linger through the years.
I asked Tim if he knew what had happened to some of our old running buddies, and he wasn't sure; for now, they exist only as memories, even though the real world, I'm sure, has pushed them on and forward. But he said that my brother had mentioned an idea of a 'running reunion' somewhere down the line.
I hope it happens. Because we all know that even busboys in restaurants sometimes hover and linger around your table longer than expected.
Friday, March 11, 2005
DREAM ON
I had a dream the other night that I was back in Japan, visiting my old school, talking to the teachers who were still there, and it was an intense dream, a vivid dream, the kind that you have when you are a kid but not so much later on in life, when dreams become little more than near-empty waystations between sleep and waking, pit-stops for weary minds.
My firm, scientific, educated opinion is that dreams are completely whack. (You can quote me on that.) I'm not sure what the hell they are; I'm not sure if Freud was onto something or not (I think Freud had some issues, personally. I'm sure he got offended when trying to fix people's problems and they'd just look at him and say: "What are you, Freud?" and he'd say, "As a matter of fact, I am.")
I'm starting to believe that dreams are just the minds way of blowing off some steam. We don't really know the mind really works anyways, right? Amazing that we're able to hold ourselves together for the sixteen, seventeen hours we spend each day on our feet, trying to make our way through life without tripping and falling to the carpet and getting rugburn across our chin. (A weird image, a strained metaphor, but I'm going with it.)
Some things I find odd about dreams:
1) We're always the main characters. Usually, anyways. And there's usually a narrative involved. And we're inevitably the main protagonist, active, excited, scared-shitless participants in our own imaginary, nocturnal escapades. Whenever people wonder about why books or novels or comics are so popular, about why we love stories so damn much, I think back to dreams; I think back to what we do every night when we hit the sack. (No, not that -- the other thing.) For some reason, our brains are hardwired to respond to life's stimuli by creating non-sensical narratives for ourselves, that may (or may) give clues as to our true, most secret intentions and wishes.
2) Dreams are freakin' nuts. I used to have dreams where I was riding a giant bagel down a winding, endless waterslide. Or I dreamt (dreamed? dreamt? which one???) that I was streaking alongside a comet through space as the universe hid its own little shuck and jive to my intergalactic beat. Or I dreamt that I watched Star Trek VI before it came out in the theatre, and that was my dream -- me, in the theatre, watching the movie. (And let me tell you, my dream version of the flick was absolutely awesome. Way better than the real version, though I like that too.) And then there's times when I'm dreaming that I'm reading a book, and in the dream I'm actually reading it, and I'm admiring my writing, and then my dreaming self says 'wait a minute, hold on, you can't be admiring this writing because it's actually your writing, and you're not really reading it at all, buddy -- your eyes are closed'. Yes, yes, that's true, but my eyes get tired when I dream of reading, and how is that possible?
4) Dreams are erratic. When I was a kid, I once had a really long, intricate dream that dissolved into thin air when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but miraculously, when I went to bed, it was back, unedited, commencing in the same place in the story from where I left it. Swear to god. And then there are other dreams that last for a minute, maybe less, as dream-time, sleep-time, is impossible to register, while other dreams merge and seque into another -- modern-day Ontario, welcome to ancient Egypt...
5) Dreams are scary. Fear in dreams is far deeper, broader and with a greater overall reach than whatever spooky stuff goes down in real life. When I was a child, I dreamt that I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and noticed something hanging from the chan-
delier that hung over our front hallway. That 'something' was, in fact, multiple 'somethings', multiple bodies, in fact, and they were dead and rotted, distorted and bloody, and when I ran into my parents room I found nothing but an old chest that slowly opened to reveal a black-gloved hand holding a pistol. The hand pivoted, pointed, and fired. I tried to scream but no sound came out, and then the shot hit my face, and I died, which was when I woke up. Whoa. That was scarrrrry, boys and girls. Another time I dreamed I was shot, and I slowly, slowly died as I lay on the street, and as I felt my life slink away, again, I awoke. (Maybe in my past life I was shot? Maybe I was J.F.K.? Or Franz Ferdinand? Or some anonymous, hopeless kid on the six o'clock news, caught in the crossfire back in early '75? It's possible.)
3) Dreams hold the key. If there's another world, an alternate dimension parallel to our own, I think it's in dreams that we access it. If there's a soul, a spritual plane to our existence, I believe that dreams are somehow connected. If there are ghosts, and an afterlife, dreams provide the gatekeeper and the gate. In dreams we are free and wild and scared and proud and young and old and whatever it is that our sleeping selves want to be.
If only life were like that.
My firm, scientific, educated opinion is that dreams are completely whack. (You can quote me on that.) I'm not sure what the hell they are; I'm not sure if Freud was onto something or not (I think Freud had some issues, personally. I'm sure he got offended when trying to fix people's problems and they'd just look at him and say: "What are you, Freud?" and he'd say, "As a matter of fact, I am.")
I'm starting to believe that dreams are just the minds way of blowing off some steam. We don't really know the mind really works anyways, right? Amazing that we're able to hold ourselves together for the sixteen, seventeen hours we spend each day on our feet, trying to make our way through life without tripping and falling to the carpet and getting rugburn across our chin. (A weird image, a strained metaphor, but I'm going with it.)
Some things I find odd about dreams:
1) We're always the main characters. Usually, anyways. And there's usually a narrative involved. And we're inevitably the main protagonist, active, excited, scared-shitless participants in our own imaginary, nocturnal escapades. Whenever people wonder about why books or novels or comics are so popular, about why we love stories so damn much, I think back to dreams; I think back to what we do every night when we hit the sack. (No, not that -- the other thing.) For some reason, our brains are hardwired to respond to life's stimuli by creating non-sensical narratives for ourselves, that may (or may) give clues as to our true, most secret intentions and wishes.
2) Dreams are freakin' nuts. I used to have dreams where I was riding a giant bagel down a winding, endless waterslide. Or I dreamt (dreamed? dreamt? which one???) that I was streaking alongside a comet through space as the universe hid its own little shuck and jive to my intergalactic beat. Or I dreamt that I watched Star Trek VI before it came out in the theatre, and that was my dream -- me, in the theatre, watching the movie. (And let me tell you, my dream version of the flick was absolutely awesome. Way better than the real version, though I like that too.) And then there's times when I'm dreaming that I'm reading a book, and in the dream I'm actually reading it, and I'm admiring my writing, and then my dreaming self says 'wait a minute, hold on, you can't be admiring this writing because it's actually your writing, and you're not really reading it at all, buddy -- your eyes are closed'. Yes, yes, that's true, but my eyes get tired when I dream of reading, and how is that possible?
4) Dreams are erratic. When I was a kid, I once had a really long, intricate dream that dissolved into thin air when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but miraculously, when I went to bed, it was back, unedited, commencing in the same place in the story from where I left it. Swear to god. And then there are other dreams that last for a minute, maybe less, as dream-time, sleep-time, is impossible to register, while other dreams merge and seque into another -- modern-day Ontario, welcome to ancient Egypt...
5) Dreams are scary. Fear in dreams is far deeper, broader and with a greater overall reach than whatever spooky stuff goes down in real life. When I was a child, I dreamt that I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and noticed something hanging from the chan-
delier that hung over our front hallway. That 'something' was, in fact, multiple 'somethings', multiple bodies, in fact, and they were dead and rotted, distorted and bloody, and when I ran into my parents room I found nothing but an old chest that slowly opened to reveal a black-gloved hand holding a pistol. The hand pivoted, pointed, and fired. I tried to scream but no sound came out, and then the shot hit my face, and I died, which was when I woke up. Whoa. That was scarrrrry, boys and girls. Another time I dreamed I was shot, and I slowly, slowly died as I lay on the street, and as I felt my life slink away, again, I awoke. (Maybe in my past life I was shot? Maybe I was J.F.K.? Or Franz Ferdinand? Or some anonymous, hopeless kid on the six o'clock news, caught in the crossfire back in early '75? It's possible.)
3) Dreams hold the key. If there's another world, an alternate dimension parallel to our own, I think it's in dreams that we access it. If there's a soul, a spritual plane to our existence, I believe that dreams are somehow connected. If there are ghosts, and an afterlife, dreams provide the gatekeeper and the gate. In dreams we are free and wild and scared and proud and young and old and whatever it is that our sleeping selves want to be.
If only life were like that.
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