and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Dreams dreams dreams lately. Vivid, and bad too. Nightmare's, I suppose they call them. Sort of fun, quite frankly, unless you actually need to get some solid sleep (which I don't). I've been so unproductive these first few weeks of the new year it's almost pointless to blog about 'em.

Discussion with roommate in which he described the Shawn of the Dead movie that came out recently. Sounds funny, would like to see it. That combined, however, with another conversation I had a long long time ago with another (ex-)roommate about how (potentially) cool a halo-esque dawn-of-the-dead type video game would be. Sure, it would take something to be put together well, and made truly scary, but I imagine it could be done. I dunno.

Fastforward to last night. Me - in bed. You guessed it. Dream about being in a halo-esque dawn-of-the-dead video game. I guess I wasn't necessarily in a video game, per se, but it certainly had similar terrain and characteristics to Halo and, well, there certainly were some zombies. Lots of them too.

The problem with nightmares is that you eventually wake up - or at least come out of your comatose enough to semi-realize what is happening and then one of three things happens:

1. You bolt awake and realize it's morning. BORING. If it's morning already then chances are you're not going to be too scared, you're going to get up, and you're going to go about your monotonous life.

2. You turn your dream lucid and take control of the ship - Potentially a roller-coaster ride of fun! This is when the big guns come out and you start mowing down zombies like it's your job. Or whatever.

3. Your mind gets trapped in a tape-loop and you relive the worst moments of your dream over and over again until you can snap out of it - this, unfortunately, is more often than not what happens to poor old me.

I was locked behind a wall of glass with.. well, with somebody.. and the zombies figured us out, and they all came charging. They started to pile up against the glass, clawing away, and generally causing a nuisance. Unfortunately, this wall was only so high - it was open at the top - and they piled up so much that they started climbing over eachother. Uh oh.

Stop.

Rewind.

Repeat.

After the fourth or fifth run of things my heart was racing a bit less and things started to feel like a bad Family Ties re-run.. you know the kind, the ones they were still playing in the late 90's and made you almost physically sick to try to watch.

This was in the pre-dawn era around 5am and once it truly woke me up the thought of the whole thing kept me up till the sun. It wasn't that I was truly frightened (though the thought of wandering out into our large loft apartment to take a piss was less than an enticing idea).. it was more that it sparked a discourse among the trolls in my head, asking over and over many time-honoured questions I'm sure you've all heard of before.

1. Why are humans so completely horrible to eachother?

2. What sort of sick bastard comes up with something like Dawn of the Dead and why, pray tell, do we find it interesting, compelling, exciting.. entertainment?

3. What the hell are we going to do about Iran?!

As I pondered these question in the pre-dawn I tossed and turned, tossed and turned, and I had to ask myself over and over what have you done to people - even just one person - what have you done as awful as this? why are you, michael, a horrible person? what makes you think you're any better than a brainwashed nazi? who writes your command letter? to which drum, michael, do you march? Is it a horrible one? Is it awful? do you like it?

Not questions I could answer so I promptly fell asleep and had another nightmare. I don't remember this one but it was about a girl and had something to do with me chasing, being rejected by, or otherwise feeling awful about, the girl. Sound familiar? Maybe becuase it's a reoccurring theme here. Maybe cause it's been piling up like manure for well over a year now. Maybe because I can't think of one reason - not one really good goddamned reason - why a girl like that should ever bother to give me a holler after all the trials and distance and lost time.

No no no, I'm not speaking with despair here. It's not "Woe is me, no one likes me". Surprisingly (and I truly am surprised folks, don't ever forget that) I am a "charismatic guy" according to some. Surprisingly, I have many friends, far and wide, who smile - nay grin - ear to ear whenever the thought of me crosses their mind. I am, surprisingly, a fairly well-rounded guy, capable of sarcasm, wit, intelligent discourse, naughty lies, and all those other sorts of interaction one needs to be enjoyed among the privelaged of this society.

So all I'm saying is I don't hate myself. It's not like that at all. It's more a matter of lost opportunity. A matter of material witness. Me being the material, her not around to witness it. Distance makes the heart grow.. well.. it's sort of a mathematical step function -> if the love is strong enough then distance makes the heart grow fonder, sure.. but if the love isn't quite there, if it doesn't quite add up, not enough to get over the camel's hump as it were, then distance doesn't do much to the heart at all.. it only weakens the memories and fades the faces.

It took more out of me to weather the alaskan storm than many a face that knows me knows. Unfortunately it was an obstacle in my path that I could not avoid, a fateful battle I had to fight, a practice in patience I had to perform. It was, almost, out of my control. The course of atoms flying about the universe, coalescing into planets, forming life, building society, forcing me here - not that they had any more say about it than I did - they made me do it, the chips.. they fell where the did and the cards were dealt as they came and I, well, I couldn't fold. What if it was a bluff? So to the skies, I looked, shook my fist with tiny might like an ant shouting at the magnifying glass that dares burn his back, I shouted "All in!". With a giant grin - admittedly, not my best poker face - I held my cards and played at the table with the best that life had to offer and.. well.. it was all chump change in the end, folks.. chump change. Who knows, if I folded.. stayed around for another hand.. maybe things would be different but all that chump change.. well, to a chump like me it all looked pretty damn good.

A fool and his money soon parts and like a fool my money went walking. I'm still chasing after it to this day. Heck knows if I'll ever find it.

It used to be, back in the dark ages when I was attending a little institution you might be familiar with called high school, I had quite the adoring little gal by my side. She was sad and sweet, to be sure, a bit of a nutter, but she meant well and she was a nice girl at heart. She just couldn't see the forest for the trees, that one. A real bit of a nutter to be sure. She liked the simple things in life (me, apparently, being one of them) and she couldn't understand a lot of the more complex parts of life like the suffering of the heart or the pain of absence. She also didn't understand patience, but that's another story. What she did do, however, was have lots of nightmares. I found this funny because at the time I did not. I didn't mock her, I just sort of chuckled to myself about it a lot, especially because these nightmares were - more often than not - about me. Specifically about me doing things like cheating on her, leaving her, etc, etc. All the common worries of a young sweetheart unsure of one's love. So be it, but I - in perhaps the naiveity of teenhood - thought these sorts of dreams about real life, where real people show up and perform potentially real acts, well I thought this was all a little childish myself. Dreams that are too life-like, I reasoned, suggests a mind so uncreative and unthoughtful that it simple plays out the most mundane acts it can come up with. Acts have already been processed in the waking hours so that the whole thing becomes a big game of opening drawers to see what already-thoughts can be found.

As I said, real boring yeah? At the time I would dream very rarely - or at least not remember very many of them - and even then they were about such off the wall topics as Einstein living in a hollowed tree trying to protect an army of 3-inch men about to be trampled by a friendly grizzly bear whom they feared to no end but who simple didn't see them because they were so small. Plus, they were never nightmares (come on, they were small.. I could kind of see the bear's dilemma). So you can perhaps understand my reasoning at the time that boring minds made for boring dreams and that maybe this girl was the swiftest wiffle bat of the bunch.

Maybe, today, I understand her a little better for all of her rantings and ravings. Today, in a time when nightmares of girls with tourette's syndrome attempt to explain the unexaplainable (like: why wouldn't she like a swell guy like me?), it all seems more plausible, in the end, that she was just a little bit..

.. in love with me.

I suspected it all along. At the time I had no real understanding of the concept other than what you read in fairytales and what you see on tv (admittedly both fairly poor representations of what true love really is) but her antics certainly had to come from somewhere so the idea of it all wasn't completely foreign to me. Maybe, I considered, she just really likes me. This was probably a whole lot harder to understand for me then than it is now - in high school I had the self-esteem of a split pea without it's other half. Again, it's a matter of self-esteem vs. self-confidence. I believed in myself sure enough, I thought I was a smart enough guy and mostly nice enough too, but I couldn't make sense out of what everyone else probably thought of me. Probably, I figured, it was bad.

I've gotten over that now, mostly, although we all still struggle with self-image now and again, but we've come full circle in our story now haven't we? If we truly preserve a positive self-image than how could our minds concoct malicious nightmares about infidelity and lost-love? Well, buy-it-or-not but I'm about to tell you. Nightmares of mine these days - at least those without dead zombies and fallen buildings - make sense of such concepts as lost-love by inserting plausible explainations. Specifically, tourette's. It's ludacris, for sure, but somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind the neurons fired away like a roomful of brainstorming monkeys trying to come up with a reason, any reason at all, that this girl could possibly meet me, know me, have fun with me for close on to six months, enjoy my company, wrap her arms around me and squeeze me so tight that you know it's not just a hug, it's a hug.. and all the chimps came up with was tourette's. She has tourette's. Her odd behaviour, her flip-flopping moods, her smiling tears.. of course! It's tourette's.

So perhaps I've overcome the struggles of self-image but in the process I have become a simpler man, dreaming the dreams of a simpler species, boiling things down to their lowest-common-denominator. I'm my old-self's girlfriend - what did I call her? Uncreative. Unthoughtful. Mundane. Somehow, though, I'm not sure I'm ready to call myself any of those things. Simple, that I can deal with, but uncreative I cannot. Instead, I will choose to believe that my old-self's evaluation of that girlfriend of mine was indeed uncorrect. She wasn't uncreative or unthoughtful or mundane or even dumb. She was, actually, a pretty bright girl. I sorta think - and I guess it explains some of my unfortunate nightmares too - that maybe.. just maybe.. she was in love.