Musings. Dreams.
My oh my, what a bizarre month it's been. Honestly, thinking back to the beginning of January breaking in the New Year in a bar in Keystone seems like a lifetime away.
A month jam packed with concerts, work, road trips to Houston, trying to help a friend through a divorce, going out with friends occasionally, and what feels like everything in between. The real thing that hurt was the amount of anguish that I found. Not in my personal experiences, but with the people that I care about (and grew to care about). In virtually everyone that I knew trying to find happiness with someone, all I saw was people getting hurt. And even then, that ranged from a friend in his thirties all the way to a friend who's twenty, from a serious marriage falling apart to the emotional scars of a college relationship. Just seeing so much of it happen all at the same time can be incredibly disillusioning. It's just odd - a part of me really feels like I'm filming the first half of a cheesy romantic comedy (because it really does feel like I'm a spectator) - where everyone involved gets hurt horribly in their current relationship, and cries their tears. Only to wait for the seond half of the movie, where each of the multitude of stories intertwine, and every person involved finds their happiness (think Love Actually). So... why isn't the second half coming?
Something that's been really strange this month is that I've started to dream again. Not the deep, vivid dreams that previal through the night and vanish as the daybreak comes - which, if you've ever spoken with me about it, you know that I almost never remember my dreams. Poof - the morning comes and they're gone. So why - I wonder - have I all of a sudden started dreaming vividly and remembering virtually every moment of them days afterwards? It's incredibly strange and something I'm not used to at all, especially because it literally 'turned on' one day, and has just stayed that way since. In a lot of ways, it's incredibly fascinating - to be able to remember.
I've been meaning to keep a dream journal, out of my own curiousity - I'm thinking of keeping them here - just because, well, what better place to dump my brain?
For some reason I remember pieces of this first dream vividly, even weeks after I had it.
I'm not sure how the whole thing started, but I remember getting a phone call from a friend and talking to her for a while. She told me she was pregnant, in a strangely non-chalant sort of way. That the bastard guy who had done it had lied about being sterile. I remember throwing together a few things into a bag and driving over to her house. I met up with her there and went into her room and I held her and we just laid there and talked until we both fell asleep. Somehow morning came and I remember sitting on a bench seat at a breakfast table with my backpack next to me and her father on the other end of the bench seat and a few other people across the table. She was around the corner in a bedroom, telling her mother what had happened. Her father had a smug ear-to-ear grin on his face that screamed "just you wait until she comes back and kicks you the hell out of here". He seemed very pleased and eager at the thought of me being forced to leave. Amazingly this entire exchange happened without speaking a word. What felt like ages went by, and she eventually came and sat next to me, putting me between her and her father. Slowly but calmly she told him, in something to the effect of, "Daddy... I'm pregnant". His grin fairly suddenly changed to a look of rage directed squarely at me. I don't know if I was caught off guard or what, but the only words I could come up with were, "It wasn't me! I didn't do it!" The kind of statement where you realize you're sounding like you're an idiot before you even complete the statement. She calmed him down and the anger subsided to a "I can't believe my daughter isn't throwing this guy out" glare at me. I remember her talking to him for a while, not in an angry way, but in a lengthy way. The next thing I remember, her father has left and she is peacefully lying on her back on the bench, and I'm sitting next to her, half lying down next to her, with her shirt partially raised, one ear gently pressed against her stomach. Just listening... for something...
And then I woke up to the sound of my cell phone ringing on the nightstand - confused as heck.
I guess really, it's not surprising at all, it makes a lot of sense when you piece it together with what I was doing at the time. It happened to be on one of the weekends earlier this month (the night of the 13th, I believe) when I was in Houston working on the mural I'm painting for a close friend who is pregnant. And before I had gone to bed, I was chatting with a friend that appeared in the dream. So I guess it really was just my brain putting together thoughts into some sense of coherency. But let me tell you how strange it was to wake up from a dream, in a strange bed, trying to figure out why I remembered it all. Very strange. I really do love being able to remember though. Now I only wish I could take some of those memories and put them on paper. Maybe once this mural is all done, I'll start sketching again.
Anyways - speaking of which, many people want to know what the heck I'm actually painting all the way in Houston, and as Sean has always said when he used to read this, "Your posts are always like freaking novels - I get bored unless there are some pictures." Well, here's a picture of what some of the mural is starting to look like - hopefully it'll be closer to completed soon:
And you know what? Just cuz this needs more pictures to compensate for all the text - here's two awesome
xkcd comics:
And probably my favorite one, and also the nerdiest:
Wow, if you really read all that, you deserve something for your time. Either that or you're immensely bored. :p
