MindsBase

I had a dream last night that one of my friends’ family was coming to visit me (on a tropical island where I lived) when I got a phone call saying that they had all been killed in a plane crash.

In the dream, I sunk to my knees and began to sob. Then I shook myself awake, out of the dream, but I still felt racked with emotion and guilt for inviting her to visit me on my island.

Couldn’t shake the feeling all morning. Don’t you hate that?

But its interesting, isn’t it, what things come out of our subconscious minds and how they affect our lives. I wonder what worries, or expectations, or preconditions we carry around with us that impair our ability to be happy and successful? If my worries are leaking into a dream, they must be somewhere buried inside me. And they probably have nothing to do with worries about plane crashes or this particular friend. Dreams — mine, at least — are abstract at least, and metaphorical at most…

Or maybe I’m just playing out story ideas while off-the-clock.

Here’s an LA Times post about the significance of dreams >>

Reading an old favorite, Thoreau’s Life Without Principle, I came across this passage. Does this remind you of today??

Swap out the words “post office” and “letters” with “net” and “status updates” and there you go:

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not.

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correstpondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

(paragraphs and emphasis added.)

Can it be that we haven’t come anywhere, socially speaking, since 1854? Hmm.

(Yes, I note the irony that I’m posting this as a blog post on the net.)