Tag: meta

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Dream Journal

Drafting Letter to Old Man

Older man, sitting in an office filled with memorabilia, showing a patch which says "Cult Leader". The man is John Waters (or at least it was, before someone replaced his face with Walt Disney's).
photo credit to Tom Atwood: original photo of John Waters, from the book "Kings and Queens in Their Castles".

Writing a letter to an old man regarding a recent experience. Maybe our trip to Mexico. As I’m editing I’m figuring out what I want and should be saying. There’s an opener which references the controversial incident obliquely — possibly rather too clever — and I try to dance around insulting the other actors involved, the greater context, or really spelling things out. I need to avoid giving the impression of a promise, or an admission of guilt. But I want to seem like the good guy. This is a creative way of cleaning up from overly-complicated events.

This is becoming a bit meta to me, the person who dreamt it and the person who’s writing it. Perhaps it seems that way to you too, dear reader. That may be because the way it’s being written appears to be auto-descriptive. Best I can give my own analysis. Take it with a grain of salt, though.

The old man was kind of a Walt Disney or John Waters type. But his moustache was not important.

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Dream Journal

Glad to See an Abandoned House

Passing though a neighborhood, I notice something though thick metal fencing. There’s a charming abandoned house deep within a private lot I’ve never been in, to the right of a flat patch of dried grass. I thought it had been redeveloped years ago and was long gone. It’s just a neglected barn-looking thing but it’s surprising and nice to see it again. I take pictures through the fence.

I’ve been having trouble lately getting myself to write down the dreams. The habit comes in cycles; I admit it. Sometimes it seems like there’s certain more powerful dream that overwhelm me, make me resent how relevant or insightful they are. Often I just get sick of having so many dreams end up in the hopper (that’s what I call the large backlog of unpublished, partially-edited dreams clogging up the back end of my site — currently sitting at 376). Even though I’m aware that these are fully for me, and that I can go look though them at any time, there’s something bothersome. Perhaps it feels a little like disrespecting those dreams. I know, too, that those are remembered more poorly — the longer they sit back there, the less likely I am to review them. So I want them published. But what’s the solution? Occasionally I’ll tell myself to strap myself in and power through the more recent ones. I’ll get through 3, maybe 5 if I’m lucky. And that could happen once every few months. Maybe more. Meanwhile, it’s not a big change. Turns out I mostly don’t remember most dreams. Worse, it seems that when I do go to the extra effort to carefully document them, the memories of writing them down can overwhelm the feelings from the dream itself. Such a delicate balance.

This has been an interesting experiment, this dream journal of the last 6 years. But it would seem I’m starting to come up against diminishing returns. I need to change something. I want it to be more than it’s been.

It occurs to me, not without some savor, that I’ve been meaning to pen down some of these dream journal meta-critiques for awhile. And it was a dream of an abandoned barn house that did it…