Dreams

Let's talk about weird dreams. Maybe you dream every single night. Or maybe you don't even dream at all - you just drift off into sleep, and nothing happens, then you wake up, and resume your day.

I have, on a regular, mostly nightly basis, really vivid surreal dreams. As a child, I used to lay, half awake in my bed, forcing my brain to think every random thought it possibly could - hoping I could have fall asleep and dream about the most amazing things. Most of the time though, I really didn't dream about much of anything. I mostly had a recurring dream as a kid where I would go down a slide on a playground, and at the bottom of the slide was an alligator, mouth wide open, eyes focused on me, waiting to devour me as its dinner. This dream would repeat often. Also, dreams about death by tornado. I don't even know. I probably watched too many musicals as a kid.

Now, as an adult, and probably due to some weird underlying Freudian shit, I have on most nights the weirdest, most surreal, creepy, dreams. It's as if David Lynch and Salvador Dali made babies and put them in my dream brain. I've often joked with my painter friends that my dreams would make good art material.

After I wake up, I typically like to do a google search for dream interpretation . Not that I take any of what I read on the internet seriously. Dream Dictionary is about as accurate as Urban Dictionary. Though, it is interesting to see something interpreted for you. For example, my dream last night (queue swishy midi track and graphic effects to swirl into dreamland):

I enter a room, naked and barefoot. The room is floor to ceiling wood paneling, square in shape, and is decorated with tacky Chinese restaurant furnishings - a fake oil painting of flowers in a vase, a wooden table with steamed white towels folded on top of each other, a black stone bubbling rock fountain, and a table with a head cushion to lay down on. The temperature of the room is warm - which is good, because I am not wearing clothes.

I approach the table, and lay down, face up. I have my arms resting next to my legs, and I can feel the warm slightly stagnant air of the room swirling past my toes, which are hanging over the edge of the table. A man approaches me, and I can't really make out his features, but know that I do not know him.

He is helping another woman onto a table near me, and welcomes us to the establishment, and begins describing a variety of relaxing spa treatments we are to receive, for free.

He pulls out a ream of dental floss, and begins tying it around the woman's neck and face and tells her to lay down, face up, as I am, and that the string will tighten her features and make her look young.

He approaches me, and begins to tie the floss around my neck, and my ears, and my face. Crossing the string from one ear, across the bridge of my nose, and then back again, delicately creating a pattern of X's on my face with the string. He tightens everything up with a few knots, and then, I lay back. As soon as I lay back down, face up, focusing on my breathing, I feel the strings cut into my skin, and I look over, panicked, and see that the woman nearby is purple-faced, and not breathing. The man is watching me, and smiling from only the corners of his mouth. This wry, fucking, creepy smile. I feel like the air in my lungs is escaping, and I panic and try to remove the floss that has woven around my head. 
Then I wake up

So. I look this shit up. Because, clearly there has to be something symbolic about getting nearly strangled to death, and this is what I got: 

"The neck may indicate the way you connect your thinking (your head) with your feelings and sexuality (your body). Your neck is also the weak or vulnerable part of you, unlike the chest or head that is protected by bone, so any attack to the neck shows being influenced through your vulnerable feelings."

Interesting.

How to be alone

If you are at first lonely, be patient.

If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We can start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library, where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books; you’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.

There is also the gym, if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in.

Then there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places.

And there’s prayer and mediation, no one will think less if your hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.

The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow-downers, employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

When you are comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner; a restaurant with linen and Silverware. You’re no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo dessert and cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.

Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.

And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you, stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things, down your back, like a book of blessings.

Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, they are always statues to talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute, and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might have never happened had you not been there by yourself. 

Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them.

But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.

But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens for holding the lonely at bay.

Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relieved, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.

Take silence and respect it.

If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.

If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.

There is heat in freezing, be a testament.  Copyrights: Tanya Davis

There is this very relevant video for this poem I want everyone to watch. It's called "How to be alone" and I found it a few years back - I like to watch it still because the video, by Andrea Dorfman, features this incredible poem by Halifax writer/songwriter Tanya Davis.