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Dreams.
Mystical objects perching on the boundary of the conscious and unconscious. Blurring the lines between reality and the unreal. Aspirations, fantasies and idle ponderings.
I spend a lot of my time wandering these wide spaces; turning over rocks, touching the moss and smelling the roses. Loitering in the grey areas of my existentialist mind. Oftentimes, with pupils dilated, my consciousness stands to attention, but my mind is unyielding, wandering far. Myth building leads me away from the humdrum of my continued existence.
Accused of having my head in the clouds yet ironically suffering from insomnia, I have a complex relationship with dreams. Incoherent at best, tumultuous at worst. Pop culture ascribes hope to dreams, but there is not always joy. As we grow, we must accommodate our failed aspirations and rationalise the hope we once held against the shards of broken dream we carry around in our backpack.
And then there is the matter of nightmares. A darkened black cloud hovering over a restless sleep. As a child one of my recurring nightmares was being trapped in a small caged space with giant spider; screaming, banging, praying for anyone to save me. No wonder I’m still scared of them – nightmares and spiders. Other times being at the top of a great height and looking, slipping, falling for what seemed to be eternity until I wake upon hitting the ground. My stomach still knots when I'm high off the ground. Just as our dreams and aspirations can break, leaving us hopeless, nightmares give us an unexpected strength to teach us about our weaknesses.
In my dreams, sometimes I'm the protagonist and other times "I" seem to be part of the audience. The altered reality of my subconscious. Sometimes my dreams, they're idyllic and sometimes they morph into nightmare – the hamartia that pre-empts my fall. Dreams are both a well from which to draw energy and a sink in which to throw it, thus it can be difficult to find the right balance between the good sort of white fluffy cloud dreaming that inspires and the dark blackened cloud sort that engenders fear and loathing - often I have no control over which I experience.
Having already given myself to chaos, dreams become yet another avenue for the unknown. Whether that is enjoying peaceful fantasies, or accepting maligned nightmares, I remain resolute to conjuring up imagined landscapes, leading me away from the humdrum of a continued existence, with my head in the clouds.