I was in Vancouver-Regina morph, leaving some place to walk a few blocks home. A man was walking on the other side of the street wearing a parka and playing a recorder. He was someone I had gone out with once before but I couldn’t be sure. I walked slowly, so slowly that I couldn’t walk straight. Couldn’t bring myself to walk up to him or even look over but I was not going to run away either. We both had to cut through the same park. He to a party in a greenhouse/tent, me towards home. Then my name was called and I knew it was him. I turned around and walked over, walked with him to the party. My face was burning. He was drunk and balding. He had something that he wanted to say to me but he wouldn’t/couldn’t. People were interrupting, distracting. I turned around to leave several times but stayed because I wanted to hear. Still, I had a surprisingly calm acceptance that I might not. Then I woke up without ever hearing, but still thinking that he might tell me something.
My dream itself is not that interesting. Waking up though, it took me some time to get back to my own reality. At 3:30am I was still in that space where your dreams and your conscious life are intertwined and you can’t quite distinguish one from the other. I had two things going on: I was wondering what he had to say and I couldn’t think of anything I would say to him (that was from dreamland) and, I had the most overwhelming sense of what am I doing with my life and why am I living it inside walls I have spent the past 25 years building (from reality).
It is 5:30, I could not fall back to sleep, and I am still obsessed with thought B. Thought A is there, but mostly as a reminder of how much time I invest in waiting for the approval of others. I wait and then I begin to accept that I might never receive. Everytime I accept, another brick is added to my wall. Of course it is fine to be peaceful with what life offers, but I think my peace has been through finding solitude and safety, not through accepting drama and pain.
The dream was a prelude to my day and today is going to be a day of deconstructing. Normally I spend a lot of time reflecting on how to make the space within my walls more pleasant. In other words, I consider what I can do with what I have. Today I’m going to consider what I could do beyond my self-imposed limits.
If I can stay awake. You’ll likely find me on the couch in x509 between 10am and noon.