You know that Tom Waits song Yesterday is Here? The foreboding lyric "all our dreams come true" has been stuck in my thoughts. The idea that our conscious or subconscious dreams and nightmares will manifest, absolutely. The more we think about them, the more real dreams become.
I've always been terrified of cancer, the idea of something eating you from the inside. In high school, when my lymph node swelled up to golf ball-proportions, I was sure it was some kind of lymphoma. The nightmare was that cancer would strike me early, for some inexplicable reason. Cancer was up there with my "top fears", only preceding being eaten by a large predatory animal or getting stuck in an Egyptian sarcophagus as it crumbles down on me (major claustrophobia). Come to think of it, watching the Discovery Channel at the tender age of four was not such a baby genius idea.
be careful what you dream of?
or live like you dream?
"He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and intellectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you perpetually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks- in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion-- so that he wouldn't be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him."
-Niels Lhyne
What will my dreams and nightmares invent in me? I'm living them both. It is undeniably better to live through what you fear most, in your darkest imagination, because it becomes human experience.
Experience is the catalyst that takes us from smoke to fire.
And I will only accept fire.
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