July 26, 2004
This is the dream of...
I had another one of my London Underground dreams last night. These are coming more and more frequently of late. The city’s always the same: some amalgam of DC and London and sometimes Tokyo, and always involving some form of underground public transportation. The train cars are closer to the surface than the DC metro or the London Tube, the train stations sometimes open air, like Tokyo, or maybe New Crobuzon’s Perdido Street Station. And the world is so vivid, so developed and real. It breaths, like a real one, and with each dream, it unfolds anew.
Yesterday, Sunday, was the first day in as long as I can remember that I was actually bored. It felt like one of those summer days back in high school, when I had no job and nothing to do. Nothing seemed particularly appealing to me; no one was doing anything that I was interested in. For the first time in my entire life, I considered going in to work on the weekend just because I knew there were things to do there. The reasoning is such: if everything is going to be boring, might as well do something productive while I’m bored. I even might have gone in, were it not for the fact that my computer was in shambles.
While the details of last night’s dream have been lost to this drizzly day’s realities, I do remember one shining, little epiphany. In it – meaning my dream – I was about to go on a trip far away… let’s say New Zealand. I was going to leave in maybe a month or two, and that inevitable feeling of apathy in the workplace was creeping in. After all, in a month, I would be off to new adventures, and what I do now would be forgotten and out of mind.
The epiphany came when I was in the twilight between sleep and consciousness, and it’s nothing amazing or new. It’s the same old one we all at least know of: life is what you make of it, and work is a means to living that life, not the meaning of it. Blah blah. But in my dream – and for a few minutes while awake – I felt that message in that profound way that you can only get from dreams, and this entry is an attempt to cling to that feeling.
It compels me to do something with my life, something that doesn’t involve toiling away in some office along some heavily trodden path.