just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper

xkcd recently did a cartoon about dreams that humorously sums up just how weird and wonderful the whole dreaming process is, and while I appreciated it, I didn't grok until this morning.

Have you ever had a dream that was so real, the emotions you experienced in it stayed with you after you awoke?

That's me, today.

My brain refuses to unlock the specific details or paint clear pictures, but the emotional memories are crystal clear: in the dream I was 20 or 21 and working for NewTek, in several different places over the course of about 18 months. These images are a combination of real-life memories and the dream-state:

I am in my office in our R&D facility, which we called "Alcatraz." My office is indirectly lit with colored bulbs and decorated with action figures, exposed wiring and defunct Toaster cards, hazardous materials warning signs, and is constantly filled with music from my CD player, which has various forms of punk and grunge on 5-disc shuffle. I feel excited and proud to be part of something that's important and changing things.

I'm standing in the parking lot, talking with my friends who are also my co-workers. We're all very isolated, living in Topeka, Kansas, but that isolation has created a real esprit du corps that I treasure.

I'm in a hotel room in Texas somewhere -- I think it's Austin -- and I have a cheap, pocket-sized spiral notebook open in front of me. I don't know why I'm doing it, or why it's important to me, but I'm writing down a sort of biography. When I look at the notes in the future, I realize that I'm taking an inventory of all the things I like and don't like about myself, all the choices I am proud of and all the ones I regret. In that hotel room, overlooking some Interstate highway, I am forced to admit that the shame outweighs the pride by a large margin.¹

I am doing a presentation at CES, at NAB, at COMDEX, at an Amiga dealership somewhere in the Midwest, at a video production shop in Burbank. I'm not especially skilled at this sort of thing, but I'm so passionate about what the Toaster can do, and how cool Lightwave 3D is, I somehow keep the audience interested and entertained. I feel tremendous pride whenever I walk off stage.

Since I woke this morning, I've felt a lot of the same things I felt back then: happiness, excitement, and this ever-present feeling that something is going to happen . . . something wonderful.²

I could be conflating some real-life emotions with imagined dream memories (or maybe one influenced the other? I don't know, it makes sense in my head, and now I'm not sure if conflating is even the right word) but I've been walking down a twisty maze of passages, all alike (where it was very dark and I could be eaten by a Grue) for a very long time. Over the last few months, I've slowly started to find my way out of these passages, and now I find myself looking at a couple of different doorways that lead to different places (but probably cross the same unknown land to get there, where I'm certain I'll have to avoid burnination.)

I'm really, really excited about these opportunities, and maybe my dreams are reflecting that excitement by pulling up memories of a time in my life when I felt something similar. I don't know, and I honestly don't care. If you spend too much time trying to figure out how the trick works, you miss out on just enjoying the wonder of it all; and if you're not a magician, what's the point, anyway?

What's important is I have (at least temporarily) traded my usual practice of preparing for the worst while hoping for the best with lots of hard work and simple enjoyment of the present and optimism for the future.

¹When I started to write Just A Geek, I thought about this moment a lot. Just A Geek reflects a need to understand where I was in my life and how I got there, and on that dark night, alone in a Texas hotel room, I felt the same thing. A big part of working for NewTek was a need to get away from Hollywood, and away from the life I'd always known, to Prove To Myself (fundamentally different from Prove To Everyone . . .) that I could do more than just be an actor, that I had more to offer, and that I didn't need fame and attention and all the associated bullshit that was driving my peers to drug abuse as they lost it in the early 90s, and reality television in recent years as they've struggled to get it back.

²They weren't all good times, of course; there was a lot of loneliness and occasional bouts of self-doubt mixed in with everything else, but the loneliness and self-doubt always passed, and I grew so much during that time, it really was worth it.