Intermission: Where is YOU?

Well, here I am. I’m going to try to include more of myself in my blog (which admittedly has the potential to end up boring and disastrous, but oh well here goes?). Last night, the rain was so loud on my skylight that I couldn’t sleep at all. As I lay in bed, I tried to think of topics to blog about. And I guess lying in bed lent itself to thinking about dreaming and how strange and interesting dreams are. It’s obvious how much of our dreams are remnants from our day. We weave together unresolved arguments and worries, fragments of images we saw on TV, people we passed on the street. But what struck me as interesting is how our waking lives sometimes mimic our dream states.

DC was a strange period of my life. Moving to a new city is always a challenge, particularly when you’re an adult settled in your life with your friends. I was comfortable in Pennsylvania, but too comfortable, and going back to school was a needed change (or at least I thought so at the time). I tend to have a lot of dreams where I’m exploring, so living in a new place and exploring new surroundings tends to automatically remind me of my dreams. Anyways, I was thinking last night of this odd freelance job I took while I was in DC with a mapping company based in San Francisco. My job was to literally “ride the rails”: each week I visited a list of metro stations and took notes mapping the exits, the number of elevators, accessibility for the disabled, etc. I found the task surreal and dreamlike because I rode up and down different lines without a real destination. Never mind the fact that the DC metro is one of the craziest, most awesomely dreamy and futuristic-looking transit systems around! I’d get out at the stations and maybe poke my head outside occasionally, but in general I spent most of my time riding the train or waiting at the station for the next one to arrive. Sometimes I’d be stuck waiting for a half an hour at a station. So I would read articles for school when I was feeling industrious, but often I just caught myself people watching and thinking.

Maybe these waiting periods were also what seemed so dream-like to me. In some ways, really, our dreams are our waiting rooms until we wake. Our lives are our waiting rooms before we die. And then maybe we hit another waiting room after we die ...?