Defining Work

Sorry for the lack of activity here. I've been a flurry of thoughts and have indeed had a lot to write about but the times when I "feel" like writing happen always to occur while I'm working. Usually it's shortly after I've arrived too, and the mood is long gone by the time I get home. I decided yesterday that I don't like working. I define work as anything you do while standing up.

Authoring Dreams

One of my new year resolutions this year is to start paying attention to my dreams again. In high school I woke up and recorded the night's dreams whenever I could remember them—sometimes four or five recollections per night, and some quite lengthy and detailed, like little vignettes in themselves. By the time I gave up this tradition of committing my dreams to file, I had been recording them over the course of two or so years and had amassed 425 dreams over 253 sleeps. At that point I quit; it had become a bit boring by then, and the sheer amount of data I had accrued (71 thousand words—the length of a novel) started to become an untidy, discordant mass of psychedelic thoughts with little hope of being mined in any coherent way.

Another one of my new year resolutions is to begin waking up a little earlier every day, in part to give myself a chance to ruminate on the importance of what I was just dreaming and to decide whether or not it would be worth typing it up and extracting whatever worth I could from the process, or at least keeping the most promising records around as a dais of thought for future consideration. A tangible, practical use for this newly inspired interest in dreams, or so I have been hoping lately, is the notion of using them as a base of creativity for plot and character ideas for the novel I am perpetually about to write but never actually writing. My previous attempts at writing a novel have started out promising but have tapered off into resigned disinterest when I could not thread the plot together in a cohesive way, particularly because I have a lot of good ideas about what I want to put into the novel, emotionally speaking, but no tangible plot in which to do it. I have been having trouble thinking originally when it comes to this life-long project of writing. I wonder, is there something more I could be doing?

I have accepted that, for some people, dreams may present answers to questions those people have been considering in real life. In my case, though, I have never been given an answer, in the form of a dream, to a question implied by the state of mind I've engrossed myself in around the time of the dream. Nonetheless, with a bit of interpretation I think it would be possible to formulate an answer that may be one or two orders off from the actual question, but still useful in enlightening myself about the current concerns and issues in my life. So the question is: can my dreams be used as a source of creativity from which I can draw useful and original ideas—say, for plots and character interactions for use in a novel?

This morning I dreamed I was in a supermarket close to closing time. I was wondering how supermarket employees get all the customers to leave on time and prevent them from hanging around for hours after close, effectively keeping the store open just by being there. This dream-thought mirrored the real-life concern I had had just hours before while doing a little shopping at the local supermarket close to its closing time. I was hurrying to get all my shopping done and I wondered the same thing: when nine o'clock comes along, how do the employees get the customers to check out their products and leave the store?

In the dream, the music playing from the speakers overhead suddenly quickened in tempo and the volume went up. Suddenly a feeling of urgency pervaded the store and I felt compelled to quickly finish my shopping, dropping the last few items from my hands into my cart. I gave in to the sense of urgency, not fully understanding why at the time, and started heading toward the checkout counters. I rolled down the aisle fast enough that I was first in line at one of the checkouts, where I was given a couple lotto tickets with a few lines of numbers on them. I was a bit confused at first, not recognising this protocol, but at the same time, the woman at the checkout said to me, "Congratulations!" And then I understood: when closing time arrives, the custom here in the world of this dream was to rush up the store aisles when you hear the music become louder, striving to be among the first few people to reach the checkout area to be given a lotto ticket and the chance to win a lot of money in return for your leaving the store as quickly as possible. I stood aside, admiring the ingenuity of the idea, admiring whoever it was who invented this ploy to get customers to leave the store as quickly as possible when it was time to close it.

I woke up a few moments later and sat up to reflect. A brand new idea was presented to me—or, I presented the idea to myself—in the dream, an idea I had never consciously considered before in my life. It was creative, certainly, and useful, and practical. For the first time, I realized, I was given an answer in a dream to a question I had asked myself earlier in the day. But it wasn't a factual answer to a simple question; it wasn't the capital city of a country suddenly occurring to me in the middle of my sleep, having been forgotten in real life earlier in the day. It was a new idea, a creative angle onto an existing, puzzling problem I pondered in my waking state. And as today went on, I came to realize the implication, the "answer" to the question I had been considering over the few days leading up to the dream: yes, with a bit of awareness and interest in my dreams I may just find those awesome original ideas that could serve as the foundation upon which I may finally bring my authoring dreams into reality.

So I will make a damn good attempt at this resolution to go to bed a little earlier than I would like and a little earlier than I'm used to, in order to give myself a chance to wake up every morning a little bit earlier and think.

Second Term of Taekwondo

I was pleased to see that the instructors basically formed a new class at Taekwondo in which to train the 8 or so new teenagers that don't fit into the kids class but don't really fit into the more advanced adult class. I was hoping that one or two new students would come out for the new term (which began yesterday), and it turned out that around eight new people had signed up. When Ellen and I got there early to watch the kids' class finish up, they had partitioned off the dojang to do a separate first class for the new teenagers. We sat in the same spot along the wall that we sat in on September 13th after meekly poking into the class to see what was going on; this time we were uniformed and sporting the second-level belt, watching the new students in their street clothes, dressed the way we were just a few months ago.

I found myself mentally counselling the different students, mindsetting one-on-one situations with some of them, going over the advice I would give them, starting them off in a meaningful, deliberate direction. I have hardly any experience compared to what I will have a few years from now, but nonetheless I do have more than they do, and found myself walking along the hall with them in my mind, arms around their shoulders, pointing the way ahead. You feel all that fear you have right now, of this scary place, of these scary people, of all these different color belts that you have no idea the meaning of, of these berserk, ear-piercing yells going on? Enjoy the fear now, while it lasts, and wait a couple of months and watch how elegantly this fear goes through the motions, working itself into power, training itself into a sense of responsibility, accreting respect for the strength you'll discover in your limbs and in your mind, strength you never knew you had. You know that innate aggressive instinct of yours that only ever got you into trouble as a kid? You know how any time you wanted to just lash out and hit something or kick something but were afraid of being reprimanded or scolded or losing the approval of your mentors? Well, things are different around here...