Alive in the House of Dreams

or 'Living with Dreamers'

There have been scores of councilors and 'experts' who have commented on the difference between 'dreamers' and 'doers'. Now, these people are most obviously of the 'doer' variety, seeing as they so readily go out of their way to try and help people with this dreaming personality defect. Apparently, it is vitally important for us Human beings to be able to either direct our imaginations onto socially acceptable paths or to suppress them entirely.

But this isn't about them, it's about us ... and I can say that, cus' if I'm not a dreamer I don't know who is.

Really, there is no one to blame, no smoking gun out there to point the proverbial finger at. A hundred professors and psychoanalysts will tell you that we are a product of our 20th and 21st centuries (or 19th, whatever you like to call it. The TV days, really). And in many ways, they are entirely correct, except for one small flaw - there has always been dreamers. It is an age-old profession that has bred world leaders and spectacular artists. And crappy ones too, but that’s a different story.

So we've been learning about Guy Debord and Baudrillard in CVC (Contemporary Visual Culture for you un-cultures half-wits ;), and it got me to thinking about dreaming. The problem today, and here is where 'society' fits in, is that people get all desensitized to it. Today's dreamers are something more (or perhaps less). They are disconnected from the sky they walk on. They get depressed because they can't seem to figure out how to get grounded, to get back into their bodies. But most of them don't know that this is why they are depressed. Its all one big wish-wash of confusing realities, and it all comes down to 'crap'. Did you catch all that? Doesn’t matter if you didn't, there isn't going to be any test. Well, really, there is a test, but there is no paper and no pencils. It's all about what you say when you ask yourself 'how the hell are you?'. Is it all crap? Or is it sunny out with a chance of rain, but that’s ok cus' you've got your umbrella. That’s the conundrum, and most of the time for most of the people, it's just a nicely packaged pile of Ikea-grade poop. And it really makes you want the lamp that completes the set.

But enough of falling off the train. The thing that I realized while walking back from class today, listening to 'a Stranger' on my portable heaven, is that what the dreamers are suffering from is a sort of observer's syndrome. If you asked me why I was continuously re-tapping up the Hallowe’en decorations, even though I know that they will just fall down again, then I would have to tell you about my first girlfriend and how she broke up with me. You see, she was trying to explain to me how she just didn't feel the way she thought she should about me, and gave this analogy: If a member of your family and some other person were hanging within an inch of their lives from a rickety bridge above a raging gorge, and you could rescue only one of them, who would you rescue. Now, she told me this from her perspective, and the whole point of the exercise was the fact that in such a fantastical situation she would choose her family member and let me fall to my horrible death, and so we shouldn't be dating anymore. Of coarse, she didn't mention death or horrible, but you get the gist. When she asked me what I thought of the whole thing, and I can remember the exact state of mind that I was in at the time, in a sort of fog of cold logic, I informed her that I would try and rescue both anyway. At the time, it probably seemed like a desperate attempt to hold things together, but in many ways I quite agreed with her that things weren't really working out. I like to play devil's advocate, so when there is a debatable issue that I feel something about, I like to debate it. What the hell does this have to do with Hallowe'en decorations or, for that mater, dreamers? Well, I tape stuff back up because I noticed it falling, and because I have tape.

This is not to say that you should go out and help every alcoholic get on the wagon, or feed every mouth in Windsor that can't find the food themselves.

Really it doesn’t mean much at all. But if you are depressed, you need to get grounded. How you do that, whether it's by enjoying the leaves on the trees or getting into a bloody street fight is up to you. One lets you keep more teeth, though.