"But take your time, think a lot
Why, think of everything you've got
For you will still be here tomorrow
But your dreams may not"
-- Cat Stevens
I had a dream last night. Nothing unusual in and of itself, I guess; I routinely have a few whenever I manage to get a full night's sleep, and am usually able to remember them fairly clearly upon waking. Often a blessing, sometimes a curse.
The vividness fades throughout the day, of course - not the clarity of picture or color or events, but of emotions felt. I used to write based on my nocturnal visions, but unless I was able to capture it all in one sitting, it usually fell by the wayside, cold, dim, and lifeless. This dream was different, though. Here I am, preparing to face the night again, and I still feel it.
The cast of characters was small, but well-known to me, if you can call people I was mere acquaintences with, and haven't thought about in over a decade, well-known. But if the cast was familiar, the scene and plot were not. It was mundane and rather contemporary, although the impression was actually more of timelessness.
I awoke homesick.
Which is strange, as I've always been a rather homeless person - living in an endless blur of military housing, college dorms, and apartments. Life was always lived in other people's houses, with bare white walls and rooms of other people's memories. Even today, I'm in the midst of a house-sitting stint, waiting for my friends to return, and trying to save enough money to buy four walls and a roof to contain my own ghosts.
So then it hits me. I'm not homesick, I'm timesick.
But for what? I have little from that timeframe to revisit; a hodge-podge collection of triumphs I've outgrown and mistakes I've outraced. I've certainly more of the former (and fewer of the latter, thank goodness) today, and they are much more pertinent to who I am and have become. But Cat Stevens has been on XMMS's infiniplay for a reason.
Dreams.
Not the dreams of people from my past, but the dreams of my own future. Dreams of a future that is now my present. Except, of course, that it isn't. I seem to have arrived here, but my dreams... they did not. Perhaps I've become too cynical with all the turns my life has taken - mostly for the best, but unexpected, for sure - to expect that any hopes and aspirations are anything but too utterly unrealistic to have. To believe in. To pursue.
To dream.
I have always worried that my future will be an undesirable place, so I try to make sure it won't be.
