Inquisited.com

Dreams are fascinating (lucid dreams even more so. But that’ll be a topic for another day), and it seems to me such a waste that most of us have such splendid dream realities and experiences but no recollections of them. Contrary to what some people think, everyone has dreams on a nightly basis since they are necessarily part of the REM phase of the sleep cycle that everyone goes through. Its just a matter of recalling them that’s tricky. To that end, keeping a dream journal helps - a notebook beside your pillow that’s used to record your dreams the first thing you wake up in the morning. If you don’t write them down immediately upon awakening, you will forget the dream. And yes, it does takes a hell lot of resolve to do consistently.

So maintaining a dream journal is something I’ve been doing for the past 5 months or so, and it never ceases to amuse me what the subconscious mind is capable of conjuring. The conversations that you hold with dream characters, especially - some of which are astonishingly coherent and may even hold personal revelations, while others seem like bad drama scripts written by a particularly mischievous 3rd grader.

One such dream conversation involved my friends and I waiting outside a bakery where a stereotypical snooty French chef was inside baking a cake. For some reason, we wanted a cake really bad. But the chef wants to have his cake and eat it at the same time, so he hands us only a small slice of it. At this point, one of my friends remarks “Shit. Don’t you wish Dumbledore was here?”. “Yeah”, my other friend replies “But be careful of wands because they’ll burst in flames if you chew them”. And we all nodded in sound agreement because it made perfect sense.

Another interesting dream I have recorded happened 3 nights after I watched the movie 300 (you can see where this is going, can’t you?). Kim Jung Il was holding a world conference of tyrants and dictators ala Team America: World Police. For some inexplicable reason I was there and sitting at the same table as Fidel Castro, who seems eager to take me as an apprentice. “Tonight,” says Castro without the slightest hint of irony “We dine in Havana!”

In case you missed it, Stardust, with its unique blend of subtle humor, fantasy, romance and action was easily one of the best movies of 2007. Yet for all its starry-eyed romanticism I found lessons within that were uncomfortably close to home. 

There’s this poignant scene where the protagonist, Tristan Thorne is held captive along with the human incarnation of fallen star, Yvaine. Tristan’s heart is with a beautiful but cold woman by the name of Victoria Forrester back in his home town of Wall. “For her, I’ll do anything to prove my love” Tristan boldly declares, and Yvaine replies something to the effect of “Yes, but what will she do to prove her love for you?”

That was a line that struck a deep chord within me. It really makes you wonder why sometimes we continually fool ourselves with hope and try (and try and try), when unrequited love, no matter how genuine or desperate, often leads to nowhere but heartbreak.

I was looking through the archives of my past blogs the other day and it struck me just how much and how little I’ve changed over the years. From the artless naivety of circa 2001, to the raging emo-ness of 2003, to the vacant apathy of 2006 - in a sense, blogs reflect the zeitgeist of our personal lives. Fascinating, but I’m glad I never kept any of my old ones online. I was such a pinhead back then.

One very obvious gap in the blog records was the year 2007. And there’s a good reason for that.

A good portion of the past year or so was spent mired in an uncertain period sometimes called quarter-life crisis. I suppose most people experience that at some point after graduation from college. Quarter life crisis is strange - its not like, say, losing your job where the are ramifications are immediately clear. Rather, it seems to creep up with you insidiously over a protracted period of time. Depression sinks in gradually as it dawns on you that life now can no longer be dictated by capricious whims as before, and that you will become yet another (insignificant) cog in the vast and unforgiving capitalist world, nothing more.

A year of working in the army bureaucracy and a national laboratory made me realize that more than anything, I need a job that grants me a high degree of autonomy and freedom. Thankfully, I think I have found a couple of viable solutions. One of which involves the internet and the other, Grad school (though exactly where I’m still undecided). Either way, I’m glad I’m over with QLC. My motivational carrots are properly dangling in front of me now. Bring on the world.