Two Prayers for the Lost Souls in the Endless Night; Part 2: The Mists of Dreamland, Or… The Neo-Noir Mysteries in the Mires of the Mind
Further Notes on Being Lost, Dreamscapes, Regret, the Road, and the Radio
Part 2: The Mists of Dreamland: The Neo-Noir Mysteries of the Mires of the Mind
“In the company of strangers, in the quiet of the railway station running scared. Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, looking for the places only they would know.”
-The Gospel According to the Boxer as Written by Saints Simon and Garfunkel (19:70)
“She went out to the hay in the morning grace, she went out and got lost in a tall hedge maze. Where’d you go? Where’d you go? Why’d you leave this place? On my heart, on my face”.
-Featherstone, The Paper Kites
This essay bears a dedication:
To the dividing line between the points on the horizon, may it be ever elusive yet continually within reach…
As kids we have dreams. As we grow, we remember them. As we age, we miss them. As adults, we forego dreams for reality, and forget that dreams are the underlying substance of that which gives reality its meaning…
It is a lovely sentiment to grow up with the words in your ears that you can grow into anything you want to be. Something so simple as the freedom constructed by the innocence of childhood can be an incredibly strong force in the composition of every element of our being from the cores of our identities to the externalization of those identities out across the seas of sociality in every interaction we experience. The curious reality of this innocent childhood hope is the unfortunate incursion of the rest of the world into the moments of ourselves that we once held so intimately close to our souls.
In the previous part of this multi-faceted journey (which may be found here), we explored the notion of being lost together. A state of being that itself requires a degree of loss in order to describe and one that I found on the winding roads of Scotland beside the rolling hills in good company. But there are other elements of being lost that live and die in the silences between conversations, in the grey voids laid at a distance apart from one another across any number of voids be they virtual, physical, psychological, or social. There are always barriers there in these lulls in momentary time that present themselves not as challenges, problems, or conflicts, but in the infinitude of what could, should, or ought to have been said. Regret, one of the most social of all human experiences, the act itself of mourning the passing of times that did not or could not pass at the moments they should have, is a powerful force in the nature of the human spirit and coming to define both where we are in a sense of grounding, and in the realization of our direct experiential feeling of being lost. We can regret the roads not traveled, the waters untested, the spaces unoccupied, the moments with those close to us lost out to the passage of time that do not recognize the significance until they too blend into the rearview mirror with the sprawling vistas.
Music, another theme of the first part of this series, can in moments represent the collectivity of moments between moments, as sometimes, to paraphrase Kenny Chesney of all people, all we have is the road and the radio. Those moments in cars where the undeniable majesty of possibility stretches out ahead of us, where the conversation halts, falters, or fades, is then itself replaced by the reverberations out across the airwaves of the mighty radio set. The experience of watching interaction fade to reflection is a curious one in the context of the open road. Conversation, across hundreds of miles, sunsets, dawns and days can in the blink of an eye, for no reason other than the natural fading of ideas slip into the unspoken and equally into the historicity of regrettable silences. In those voids there is the voice on the speaker, be that the AM talk host preacher crackling across the Utah desert, the satellite corporate automaton in the premium coastal radio headquarters, or even just the reverberations of Bob Dylan rasping The Times the Are A’ Changin’ via Bluetooth, the thread of commonality is the measured metering of the beats of the regrettable silences there in between the points.
I have had full-scale arguments on road trips, where the only peaceful reprieve is the minute of music as your combatant makes use of the roadside restroom at 2 in the morning before you start again. I have too experienced the quiet majesty of road trips alone where the radio is not only the bridge across the silence, but it is the companion itself. Irrespective of the cause of these lulls, of these passings of potentiality into crystalline memory, they are representative of something inherently beautiful in the human experience. How a joke, a confession, admiration, admonition, or adulation can in a moment’s blink diminish entirely into a thousand million shatterpoints of potentiality that never themselves manifest much more than a memory of the regrettable silence.
Regret then is not memory. Memory holds for us the imagined recreation of what has happened. Regret, on the other hand, is not reflective of reality, but rather of the reality we wanted to see. Regret is the dream that grows from the combustion of childhood innocence. It is a fantasy, an imagined reality, a place where we hold not only the keys of total control but a place where we may place a sense of ourselves inside a perfect memorial moment to only ever see ourselves how we want to remember. Regret is living in all of the pasts that did not occur, which quite inconveniently, infinitely outnumber the singular past that did occur. The frightening thing about regret is that there are exponentially more realities to regret than there are realities to remember. Some are small, and opting for banana bread over zucchini bread at the café is a minor regret that fades into Tuesday Morning. Sitting on the cusp of a doctoral degree in a field that at times questions your sanity, looking fondly back at an email from 2016 accepting you into an internship and future career in espionage that still sits unanswered in your middle school inbox, these are real potentials for regrets. There are moments in our time where the infinite possibilities of the world around us are blended into what could have happened, and in our reflection, we are faced with the discomfort of having to come to terms with the decisions that we were either forced or free to make in our history. Do we look kindly upon our past self to validate the decision, or do we allow that regret to fester a pain inside us years or decades into the dawns?
Aside from the material regrets, the career decisions, the paths not taken, per Frost, begrudgingly, there are other subtler things to regret. Implicit and clandestine sources of despair; regrettable silences, classified to the highest degree of secrecy. A fair portion of our most intimate and innermost thoughts pass into regret. Into a shadowy world of wishing we had just been more confident, more in control, braver, more open to the love around us, and cruel of all: more aware of the passing ships in the night we missed on our own long declines. We miss the signs all the time. For the start of a journey, a relationship, a connection, intimacy, love, affection, freedom, joy, or a memorable moment of ecstasy frozen in time. We are, collectively, terrible at communicating in general, but more specifically in communicating the existence of opportunity. We revel, even the most extraverted of us, in the culturally constructed idea of subtlety when in reality we just simply cannot be trusted in our own interpretations of the signs outside our own minds. We broadcast in our actions, body language, words, and gestures and display a whole host of intentions we believe are so wildly obvious that they cannot be ignored, and then, in the moments that they are indeed unnoticed, we take in an instantaneous regret, and an internalized conditioning of guilt, shame, pain and despair that in the bleeding hours of the sleepless nights come back like ghosts from the walls to haunt our minds and bar us from the sweet release of sleep. We assume ignorance, and we equate disapproval and disdain for ignorance and illiteracy. The social is not a world that can function interactionally between us in a world of meanings that only we know the significance of. A gesture, a pose, a momentary pause, a joke, or an expression in the right moment, to the performer, is the perfect telegram to the soul, to the audience it may very well just be another in a string of sketches between the road and the radio.
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Regret is not a sense of being lost. Rather, it is the direct inverse. Regret is the patchwork of signposts lining the lanes of our history back from this moment in the present to our earliest experiences. It is not proof of us not being lost, but it is a route back to the turns and paths that put us where we are today. Regret lets us be found. It allows us a reflection on the instances that led us astray to these places between places that all too often leave the 20-something on the floor at three in the morning demanding an existential reason to continue existing of their sleep-deprived and stress-addled minds. Regret tells us where we have strayed and maybe in some developed emotionally intelligent manner, we can deduce a means of correcting our course before we burn out into the sun.
The act of sitting in regret is not mental torture, nor is it some distortion of experience. It is essentially akin to re-discovering an unsent love letter to a long-lost muse and settling in to read it to yourself and feel the passion, the hopefulness, and the joy, while also allowing the crushing pain to wash over your soul at the thought that had you just negated one of the countless regrettable silences of life with the plunge of faith in the face of despair, you could now be warmly embraced in the safety of the futures past. Regret is the evidence that you have lived and that you have done so authentically. We often associate regrettable silences as flaws of character, missed chances to be better, or moments wherein we temporarily suspend ourselves in deference to the social forces beyond our corporal forms. But in reality, the ability to retroactively examine and cross-examine these regrettable silences, these moments lost, is evidence of our capacity to recognize who we are, to know where in the stream of existence we have strayed from that personhood or identity. Regret is not inauthentic being, but it is instead a litmus test of our nature of self and our grounding in those factors that define our conceptualization of the very most intimate inner machinations of our being. The self is not built or maintained through perfection in performance, nor solely on the positive exchange of symbolic social meaning. There are, as with every nuanced regrettable silence an infinite multitude of monochrome shades of complexity in the path of remembering and recollecting ourselves in our finest and darkest moments of personal agentic action. It is a mark of our autonomous nature to be able and willing to be regretful of actions that we have missed. Conversely, it is reflective of an inauthentic experience of social reality to never regret our paths. We cannot claim to know ourselves, truly, without a sense of knowing that somewhere along the way between then and now, we have taken the wrong path in the wildwoods of experience. When regrets are tinged with the loss of potential ecstasy, they sting our souls with longing, a deep inward sense of yearning for what could or should have been. When the tines of regret are stained with pain caused unto others, the regret twists in our sides as the blade of guilt in our conscience. In both cases, if we cannot regret the love we failed to share and the pain we have caused, then there is no legitimacy in claiming a sense of knowing one’s self, let alone knowing one’s authenticity in being. The flaw in regret is not a sense of being lost, because regret is antithetical to loss, but rather the flaw is in its absence. It is a critical lens through which we reexperience our histories individually and collectively and wherein we do so with a mind to reconcile the missed opportunities and to amend the slights of pain caused. A regret ends in an apology. To the self, through the torturous realization that one word, gesture, touch, tone, or moment could have rewritten the future that has since become the road between then and now, or to the other in spirit or in an exchange of symbolic meaning that says that not only has the torture of despair been enacted within our minds, but that the hurt has been acknowledged. Regret is ultimately, the tempering atonement for our past selves, a continual lifelong reverence of the capacity of the social soul to allow itself room for repair, despite the difficulties in letting go of what we had once desired.
Losing the sense of dreaming on the horizon of 30 is regrettable. It is categorically lethal to the spirit both socially and metaphysically. We cannot come to reconcile our existence further should we fall into the world of losing the worlds beyond worlds. How though do we come to emerge in the latter half of the long decline in a place where the dreams stay among our mortal thoughts? To understand this we must separate the notion of dreams from the tangled zeitgeist of their contemporary definitions. In this regard, I do not mean the dreams that manifest as abstracted spacescapes across our eyelids in the dead of night or in the death of darkness in our warm beds. The abstraction of reality in the sleeping mind is not the agentic performance of dreamscape exploration that truly and metaphysically builds our notion of ourselves. This is not to say that sleeping dreams are not integral to our performance and understanding of ourselves. Instead, to say that their aspirational projections can in their emergence be some of the harshest realities to instill a sense of being lost. I have long contended that good dreams are true nightmares because they always end the same way: we wake up. I feel I cannot be alone in saying that I have experienced good dreams, and especially during horrifically dark moments of life I have experienced dreams too good for their own good. A dream that breaks into the buffer between days to dangle in front of us the idealized world as it could be, only to shatter into millions of fractals between atoms the second reality slaps us awake. Sure, we could be wrapped tightly around the partner of our dreams, sharing our dream home and wishing beyond wonder and wild desire for the pure indescribable bliss of knowing that all is right, safe, warm, and secure in our lives only to be shellshocked to hell upon waking to realize we are still alone, or worse locked into an inescapable mire of abuse and pain. I have seen these dreams end this way on the heels of daybreak. Awakening not to the warmth of hearth and home, but to the realization that I am instead on the cold carpeted floor of my brick-walled office safehouse, hiding out for yet another hungry night unable to even remember what it felt like to experience joy. I am not in the arms of my soulmate, I am not warm, I am not happy, and yet, in the blissful moments of sleep, the dreamscapes cruelly materialized from the marshes of the subconscious to tease my mind into believing for those moments that just maybe the pains of the waking world are themselves the dreamscape. This is not the dream that manifests a sense of being lost. They may, in their manifestation of unconscious desire, subconscious reasoning, and oxytocin-laced pantomime instead remind us somehow of our humanity in sobering realism. The inverse, the nightmare, the dwelling on the dark, the macabre, the traumatic, and the painful are more closely tied to the sense of being lost than the falsities of a life potentially containing joy. A nightmare is a place where the reality around us reflects in its clearest form the writhing tentacles of social reality within and without us.
The dream and the subversive sounds of dreaming are the exploratory zeniths of our journeys to the centers of our minds. This is not a Freudian take, but rather a reflection on the importance of the worlds between our waking moments in the worlds beyond our doors. These spaces where our minds exist unencumbered by the weights of the world beyond become sacred to us in our capacity to mitigate those weights as they grow and emerge. Elsewhere I have written of the beauty in the complexity of the social interaction, where the exchange of carefully curated symbolic meanings between individuals leads to the growth and essential flourishing of the world in its social spheres. There is a magic in meaning-making that we participate in every single moment of our existence. This does not discount the dreamt world. Instead, it reflects a stronger and more pressing rationale to further dive into the states of dreaming for dreaming’s sake, and to instead model an approach to the functional practice of dreaming as a mirrored window to the nature of the human condition.
This is not however a call to analyze and interpret the dreams of the sleeping mind. We are not searching for pseudo-Freudian sexuality in every tree trunk in the forest, but instead, we are far more enthralled with the living and waking dreams of the everyday individual. The hopes and aspirations that stretch on out into our futures as a way of guiding, influencing, and manifesting our desired reality. We dream in such a way that it is indistinguishable from the state of dreamscapes of sleep while we are awake, fabricating wonders and wild desires out into the oblivions of the unknowable and deep future. It is the classical state of the child being asked what they want to be when they grow up, but deeper than that because as the ability to dream wanes past 30, the dreams become longing. We yearn for that which we have imagined for ourselves and therein lies the potentiality for dreams to descend into toxicity. We are the most equipped alchemists to manufacture our poisons. Our minds have the unique capacity to fabricate idealized versions of ourselves far off into the future where we have overcome every obstacle, met every milestone, and conquered every peak. This is dangerous for us because the curious nature of the mind is to sometimes blindly ignore the limitations placed upon it by the world around us.
So where does our daily dreaming of ourselves in our futures lead us? Where is the salvation from disappointment? If I were a more inspirational voice I would say that the antidote to our homebrew poison is to achieve our goals, but I also must rest on the notion that our dreams for ourselves can be hindrances to our achievement of less abstracted dreams that lend more to our overall sense of authentic presentation of self. It is in this struggle between optimism and pessimism that I find myself arriving at the singular piece of advice I can offer on this subject matter and I do recognize fully that it breaks from the typical academic writing conventions:
Fuck it all, do what resonates the most harmoniously with your soul, and do it for you.
There is an indescribable number of pressures placed upon us in this world to perform, to meet expectations, to set and achieve goals, and all of it, truly from a place of sociological realism represents nothing more than a fabrication of the social world, an illusion itself hinged solely on the understanding and classification of the human spirit as a commodity to enact production. To hold dreams close to our hearts is no longer a sacred and intimate way of being, it no longer serves as a means of kindling our passion’s fires and guiding our ways through the world. Instead, we are expected to hold aspirational dreams sometimes far eclipsing our true desires or our abilities. We have become vessels of production whose productivity hinges on the acquisition, pursuit, and achievement of socially prescribed dreams.
In sharp contrast to elements of Siddhartha by Hesse, we do not deviate from our caste systems to pursue that which is enriching our minds and spirits and instead, reflect the opposite: an abandonment of that which enriches our lives, and a consensual descent into the cyclical suffering of caste-based post-industrialized capitalism.
This is not a Marxist essay, nor will I call down the words of Lenin from on high to speak of the liberation of the proletarian masses from the specters of capitalism. In the same vein, there is something inherently Marxist here, but not the internet Marxism that so many of my generation fall prey to. Instead of raging against the economic and social machine of capitalism, I am instead concerned with something far more reminiscent of the earlier metaphysical elements of dear Comrade Marx: the loss of the human spirit to the machine of production.
Therefore, the question based on the commodification of dreams comes to this point: to what degree are the internal aspirational dreams products of our individual experiences, and to what degree does the social world around us shape both the dreams themselves and the social weight placed upon them?
Elementally, the loss of dreams to the machine of that which is prescribed is a hallmark feature of losing oneself. We cannot fully define the self, for its complexity in individuality is indescribable in a universal sense, but a critical point of the facilitation of a sense of self is the ability to perceive the self as something fluid in its experience of time. Aside from regret and nostalgia reflecting an existence in the past, and beyond the self’s ability to relegate and mitigate the interactions of the present, a third component of an integrated sense of self is seeing oneself in the future. Being able to conceptualize our movement through time from one day to the next and so on. This is the foundational building block of aspirational dreams of the self, and in that critical position in the psychosocial development of individuality, the question must be raised: are these our dreams?
There is evidence from my colleagues in psychology that the frontal lobe of the brain develops last, as we grow, reaching maturity around 30 years of age. The frontal lobe also helps us to be able to extrapolate interactional social information into abstractions in the future. It is the place where self-awareness of oneself through time occurs. Given this, there is a sharp contrast between self-perception towards the future in children and adults, with even more variety and complexity between early childhood and puberty, adolescence, and adulthood, and later stages of adult development. It is not a surprise to me that the capacity to dream is often met with reality sometime around the mid-20s, at least in the West. In the West specifically, we have a mindset that holds that to a degree we teach our children as children that they can be ‘anything’. Doctors, astronauts, lawyers, etc. These ‘anythings’ are also accompanied by vague translations of the term: “As long as you work hard, you can be anything you want to be”. A reality that I feel a fair few of my millennial comrades will relate to is the curious disconnect between the parental virtue of ‘you can be anything you want to’ and the parental expectations for their children and what they ought to be. Therein lies the challenge to the dreamers: the reconciliation between which dreams we dream and which dreams we’re told to dream. To me, this conflict is at the heart of the sense of loss we feel now rounding 25. This sense that we’re not where we want to be, while simultaneously being right where we were planned to be, to an extent. The fragile toxicity of expectations when it comes to which dreams we should or should not hold is that the inherent companion to the expectation is disappointment when it isn’t met. Being the subject and origin for disappointment is difficult in the best cases, and traumatic in the typical ones. Feeling some embodied sense somewhere within our identities, especially when it is associated with someone we are supposed to love, like a parent, can be deeply painful. This puts us at odds with where we feel drawn to be and where we are somehow socially prescribed to be.
I cannot speak to the lived experience of others who grew up outside of the US, and I know that the early 21st-century American cultural construct of a childhood is not entirely relatable beyond those who experienced it, and even within this cohort, our experiences are stratified. Upward mobility as a cultural construct looks different depending on where your ground floor is. The affluent white kid with a birthright legacy admission to Harvard probably could become anything they wanted, but even within that stratification, should they have held the dream to set aside the trust fund, Wall Street career, and silver spoons, they too are not free from mummy and daddy’s inherent expectations for where Harvard Jr. will end up in life. There is far more to say too on the commodification of this type of struggle as it has so uniquely permeated the lived experiences and sociocultural zeitgeist of the aging millennial. Perhaps pompously, we see ourselves as the last of the dreamers. We proudly share how we are anti-influencer, anti-TikTok, and how our true passion lies in the wild unknowns. Some of us are true to this, the dreaming wanderers out beyond the grasp of social construction who strive into the great unknowns with a true wanderlust, these are the souls that are few and far between our general public awareness. Why? Because living our most authentic dreams of freedom and exploration means that we do so for us, and not to share beyond very close circles. Those of us who have forgone the ‘rat race’ to chase our dreams, and who do so publicly in sponsored social media content have missed the point entirely.
So, the question emerges then where do the dreams go when the dreamers wake up?
If we are to be the last of the dreamers, synthesizing a sense of life and liminality into our states of being, with some form of inherent recollection of that which must be reflected upon in our positions in the cosmos, then where indeed do the waking and sleeping dreaming states of dreams go?
The Mists of Dreamland
“No, I'd rather go and journey where the diamond crescent's glowing and run across the valley. Beneath the sacred mountain and wander through the forest where the trees have leaves of prisms and break the light in colors, that no one know the names of.”
-Wasn’t Born to Follow (Byrds, 1968)
Somewhere nestled between the shaking leaves of waking and the twisting vines of sleeping there lies a middle-ground purgatory that somehow reflects both the shimmering lakes of dreaming and the despairing din of waking. It is here, within this mystic vale of confusion where we may find the sprawling metropolis of dreamland. Dreamland, is a name that evokes some semblance of nostalgic collective memory, somewhere in the passage of our own species of time, someplace that we all seem to have lived all at once and never at all. We walk the streets as they wind through and away from one another, the ground warps here and there if only to ensure us that the passages between home and our destinations is never solid ground, that at any given moment those frameworks upon which we walk may slide into the abyss between waking and sleeping. Dreamland looks alive, its dazzling neon and warm tungsten glows are everywhere, and in the silence of the mists that rise from the streets, there is a certain homeliness of it all. Something familiar like a warm cup of tea on a brisk November morning, but it is itself a sinister place in the same bated breath. The steam, the light, the warmth, the uncanny familiarity of it all, it belies a worrisome reality beneath the veneer of the metropolitan dreamscape. There is a sense as your heels click on the pavement, that you are wandering within the throngs of a crowd, but all around you, in no specific direction, and all of them at once, you recognize there in the street, your isolation. We are alone in our dreams, and our Dreamlands, while sharing some vague notion of interconnectivity across the universe, are themselves ghost cities, devoid of any humanity in any direction. The shops and cafes, the bars and nightclubs, all of them are at a cursory glance something approaching normality, but upon even a slightly scrutinizing secondary investigation, the facades are all impenetrable. There are no doors in Dreamland, no inside, nothing but the streets taking us forward and ever into the abyssal vanishing line at the crest of our perspective. It is hard to pick a point on the horizon when the horizon is ever-shifting across every viable physical axis in a perpetual randomized fragmentation of sensibility. We may not set a course to the second star on the right, nor follow it straight on until morning when the sky above is blotted out in the dioxazine haze of endless neon. The only place we may find any indication of temporal spatial reality or direction is there in that which grounds us to the tidal landscapes upon which we may walk-the feeling of our feet falling on in front of the other as we endlessly trudge on through the dawn.
Dreamland is where we find ourselves when we have lost ourselves, without ever truly absolving the sense of being lost in ourselves. A place that represents some thin barrier between the mysteries of the mind and the inconvenience of rationality. It is here that our regrets, our hopes, our dreams, and our capacity to stretch our minds out into the future fade into the bliss of uncertainty, in a sprawling cityscape that takes us into a noire hellscape of infinite abstracted depravity. This inhospitable landscape, infinitely ensconced by the grey-green fog of doubt, blotting out the sight of stars with the blinding neon of promises of something better across the threshold, this place where the echoes of our footfalls reverberate across the empty and deserted courtyards and sidewalks is where our dreams die. It is where we lose ourselves, and our capacity to aspire to those dreams of childhood that season our inhalation of a cold night’s air with the cinnamon-tinged warmth of potentiality. As we walk, peering behind the frosted glass of every shuttered doorway, as we gaze up in search for any signs of life in the towering windows, as we scream into the mists for something, anything to scream back, we are met with nothing. An abyssal inverse of existence and being, a transitory space of nonbeing and nonexistence, where the conventions of everyday life, the spheres of the social, the paths of the way forward, and our ties to that historicity of our souls that we have long since moved beyond all simultaneously vanish and blend into an infinitude of interconnected conduits to the same insane ideas of who or what we may ultimately be.
Here in Dreamland, we ruminate on what could have been, dread what is, and fear what may or may not be. It is where a thousand arguments are won and lost, where ample pain and suffering plague us just beneath the surface of our skulls, and where, maybe, in fleeting moments on the side of the avenue, we may find a sheltered awning for a momentary gasp of grounded warmth and serenity. These gasps, collectively taken across the eons of a lifetime provide us with those moments that lend to our senses of what may influence our dreams and our nightmares. These dreams, be they waking, or those of the zeitgeist of the night, are themselves constructive frameworks that rattle and hum beneath the misty streets of Dreamland. If in the meandering rambles of this insane missive to the voids of communication, there is any hint of a notion of interconnectivity, within the title of the overall series, we may offer a metaphysical grounding in the concepts here. The state of being lost, and the mists of dreamland together find themselves intertwined in a loving embrace within that Endless Night.
We are lost by and for our dreams, and their subtle psychoses are liminally rooted in the sense held deep within the symbolic milieu of self of a loss of knowledge of our sense of being and existing in space, place, time, and social reality. We are lost so that we may dream, and we are lost because we dream. And in our states of being lost, being found, and somewhere in between in the mires of dreamland we may find a perpetual issue that plagues our very understanding of self: the fluidity of states of being that we are so ever-presently unaware of in our movement through the flow of time.
Cresting the hill of 25, we come to exist more and more in Dreamland, wandering, ever-present in its twists and turns, unsure entirely of the faces we see as shadows in the mist and if they are to be ones to follow, to trust, or ones we should allow to fade into the bleak darkness between the streetlights. We all somehow find ourselves here, the amount of time we spend there varies, but in some way, we have all heard the echoes of our shoes on the cobblestones of Dreamland. This is why there is an unknowable familiarity to the place, why the petrichor of the sodden and misty streets harkens us back to a place we cannot know, yet are intimately familiar with. It is here, where the loss we experience when we leave home, when home leaves us, when those faces that once were sources of warmth turn to cold unforgiving masks, when we have to reconcile who we truly are with the assumptions of who we are expected to be, that we may find, if we are lucky, fellow wanderers out into the sounds and sights of what lies before us.
We can fall into love in these streets, and we can infinitely romanticize that which is not loving in the same steps. It is a torrent of oddities, blazed only brighter by our own personal eccentricities we carry along with us. In the briefest of waking moments, it is possible to see and to connect inwardly and outwardly with those fellow dreamers in our midst. I have felt this limerance at the moment, as I am sure others have. To know, instantly, that the soul on the other end of the conversation is not simply good but that they have, through their experience, felt the same brambles cut into their feet as they wander, that they have shed the same tears into their pillows, and that the blood of their veins may also be the same that we have spilled as we stumble through our forests. In this liminal space in time and age between childhood and the long decline, we are free in a very few moments to seek out in the connections we make, clues to the nature of this escape, we may then together explore the mysteries of Dreamland in safe and serene company. To wander into our minds in safe company, to take those plunges knowing that the caring eyes of those we love are just there beyond the mists is to allow ourselves a chance at perhaps finding some of what we have lost.
When we become lost, when the wide world opens to us and our senses of direction in self, in time, and place fall away and we are there alone, this is what we need so desperately to come to, not home, not the past, nor the future, but the time out of time in the place without place of Dreamland. This is where, in our waking states or in between them, we are to find those others we love and try as hard as we can to break ourselves outward into the world of not finding ourselves, but just on the path coming to know where it is we are standing, and where our feet may be taking us in time. We have had these moments, and they are the ones where Dreamland and its subtle horrors break on through to the lived side of life, where nestled close in bed, across the seas over the phone, or mere feet apart in a warm wooden pod, we can allow that inner vulnerability to be seen knowing we are projecting that dreamt personification of ourselves into the loving light of another traveler that understands our journey. In the hugs, the kisses, the tears shed and the pain comforted our times in Dreamland come together despite themselves to lay bare our humanity to one another. We may find these faces in the mist as friends, as brothers, as lovers, or simply as voices that come and go in the passing of the night’s darkness to lead us to a place where we may pray to be seen, heard, and felt in all of the ways that ground us to this waking world and away from the murky aspirational pulls of the other places our minds may go.
Dreamland is built upon a foundation that hinges on the innocence of our dreams, and the suppressing weight of the dreams others hold for us. We see a city laid on pillars of expectations and aspirations that together collide to form waysides of regret, pain, failure, triumph, or gratitude. The currents of synchronicity are herein as well shaped and molded outwardly so that we may, on a whim’s whim come to find that heart we truly desire to know. To find ourselves amidst the dreams, to separate the aspirations from the expectations, and to reconcile them into the crash of material reality, is the true battle of the quarter-century milestone. Where in whatever tract we may find ourselves, be that searching for a home, for love, or a future, realizing that which we have is not what we desired, or existing in the contentment of where we have arrived, we are compelled to do so in spite of the tacit pull of Dreamland.
Before we may wake up entirely, or sleep eternally, there lies the challenge ever so subtly imbued in our crafting of our paths that we must recall paramount. To love one another when we find those faces in the mists that radiate outwardly a warmth of serenity, and to conversely be ever present in the streets of Dreamland to welcome those who may need us into our hearts fully and entirely without prejudice. In a word, to feel safe to ask for friendship, and to offer it, to be the hug in the cold, to be the color in the grey, and to love ultimately, completely and fiercely. It is the path to knowing, which is the path to discovering just what it may be out in the wildwoods of uncertainty that we are searching for, even if we are not sure yet that we are indeed even searching.
TF
Papers in Residence, Vol. 3