Friday, August 10, 2012
5:30 a.m. I had a long dream that seems to me just like my life. I was one of a group of kids going for a hike. a Boy Scout patrol, probably. I was at the rear of the column, talking with my cousin Tom, I think. I changed places with him, and I was on the right side of the column. We started off, and my hat blew off. I had to get it, which only took seconds, but when I went to catch up with the others, they were nowhere in sight. I followed up the road in the direction we had been going, but couldn’t see them anywhere ahead. I came to a crossroads, continued straight on, heading where I thought they were headed, but I never saw them again. I think the road turned into a dirt road. A series of strange things happened (I knew at the time, but couldn’t remember when I woke up). I couldn’t ever find the others again. I knew I would be blamed, accused of not looking for them or of deliberately going off on my own. I knew I’d never be able to prove that I really had tried to keep up with the others – and I also gradually realized, it wasn’t anything I’d done that had separated me from them, it had just happened.
I woke up thinking, well, that’s my life.
[Addition, 2020]: This is the best capsule description of my life that i have ever seen. I never intended to be different. I was just another kid among kids, doing what they were doing. The wind — the spirit? — blew off my hat and led me to chase after it, and in the impossibly short time that my attention was distracted, I lost sight of the others — of ordinary life and was never able to rejoin it. Even at the time, I recognized that my actions would look like willful deliberate eccentricity and that nobody around me would believe I was just living my life, with my contemporaries not in sight. As to the strange things that happened after the street became a dirt road, well, that was accurate enough too. I didn’t remember them then and I don’t now.
Interesting how our life is sometimes foretold in our dreams, or encapsulated, or explained.
Such a clear dream, not obscured by anything abstract or overly symbolic. Once when I was leaving one town for another state, I had a dream of being let out of jail. It was clear enough that I could smell smells and feel surfaces. It let me know I was doing the right thing. Those dreams stay with you.