Dreams & Dreams

There's a million things to do and see and destroy, but it's funny how we all sink into routines, encased in our little submarines under everything. I get so excited all the time by a new song or an old photo, it's like with new things you get turned into a different person all of a sudden. Like I was a different person before I read this novel, or before I bought this new shirt. It's weird thinking about your identity and your personality, who you are fundamentally to yourself. Because it's never really the same. Moment to moment I feel like I've changed in every way sometimes, the river has carried me out to sea. Everything is different in an instant.

Yet of course I'm the same person, doing the same things, performing the same mannerisms and conjuring up the same nervous thoughts, probably. But so many things still shake me as if I've been transplanted to a different world. I get excited by writing blog posts, by taking a moment of my thoughts and committing it to a page, but then in the routine of writing I get stuck in a formula and I sit there and try to form a post, to pluck it from myself like a stuck feather, and it gets to be a weird simulation. An attempt to make the same thing happen and to arrange the same words in a different way, almost. It gets futile and tough.

That's why I like thoughtless and aimless and spontaneous things though. Diary entries and scribbles. Streams of consciousness written ten seconds after waking up, when your head's still full of fuzzy dreams.

Last night I dreamt about a friend going with me to a labyrinthine old estate, and a charity shop piled high with thick tweed coats and pleated grey miniskirts. It was gleeful and adventurous, but dusty and alien and a bit uncomfortable. He was urging me to buy the grey skirt that looked like a strange 1960s hounds-tooth thing. I pulled a children's book about doctors from a shelf. Its illustrations had thick black lines and simplistic stethoscopes. He was playing, laughing, and I was uneasy in this place of strange surroundings piled high.

I think this dream is a great representation of these kinds of thoughts and worries. How do you keep doing things that are new and exciting and that pour out of you? How do you do that when you have responsibilities and routines and the normal restrictions of life and your own mind? But I guess this question really ends up being "how do you live?" - and that's a question that doesn't have one clear answer. That's a question that's like a dream.

There's so many ways to do everything and nothing, to think and to try and to also crucially stop doing those things. Sometimes it has to be about doing nothing, in the most "something" kind of way. Sometimes we're dreaming when we're awake, and that's what works. Sometimes it's only dreams of consciousness.