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Posts tagged ‘dreams’

Aug 16

46 Comments

A Kind of Magic

Have you ever had a dream? I don’t mean one of those night-sweat-inducing versions of Technicolor that sometimes occurs in the subconscious, but an actual, bonafide dream, something you wanted to see happen more than just about anything else in life?

My life is littered with shattered dreams, with unfinished dreams, with never-started-dreams. I had to be forty to go after an actual dream, and I still sometimes wonder whether I have the mettle to see it through to the end. We have people who interpret sleepytime dreams in abundance. Where’s the person who actually tells you what your living, breathing dream means? How to muddle through another conversation about your dream, when you really just want the person to hug you and tell you they believe in you? How to rise above so many incidents that could only occur in the altered universe of dreams, but they happened TO you, blasting through a conversation or blinking at the end of the cursor on a silent screen?

And so, when all else fails me, I turn to Queen.

A Kind of Magic is, for me, an anthem for my living dream. I’ve played it twenty times at the end of a frustrating lunch, blared it until my ears rang while reading another rejection, tapped my foot along with Freddie as my eyes ran with lonely tears,  and toasted every minor success with it gyrating in the background. When people fail me, when circumstances threaten to crush me, when I want to curl  in a corner and whisper “I give up,” a simple piece of music always sets my dream aright.

Until the next time.

Do you have a song that pushes you to believe in your dreams?

This post is part of the series The Soundtrack of Life. If this is your first visit to the series, please click here for the first installment, click here for the second, click here for the third, click here for the fourth, here for the fifth, here for the sixth, here for the seventh, here for the eighth and here for the ninth. MTM wrote a great guest post, which you can find here. Thanks for your contributions and insights in the comments. They always enrich this blog, especially in a series like this one.

Sep 24

28 Comments

Zen and the Art of Missing your Train

This doesn’t happen very often…Andra is out before me. Usually, she struggles to get to sleep, reading or writing late into the night. If there is one thing I am good at, it is falling asleep. If I am prone to do it, I can be in Dreamland before you can finish reading th

It seems to be a recurring theme, the leaving. Always running through waystations. All these grand halls sound the same, the staccato of heels echoing off impenetrable surfaces, the cacophonous murmer of unintelligible conversations. Is it that everyone is speaking in foreign tongues? The layering of voices overlap and interweave, the faceless sources unrecognizable yet familiar, like deja vu mind games. 

Moving through these scenes feels like a riding a mobius strip, a perpetual conveyor belt that threads through a labyrinth of concourses and atria. Up escalator becomes moving sidewalk becomes elevator then down escalator. Its like the space is folding upon itself, enveloping me in an origami of reflective terrazzo and glass.

Being caught in this prism multiplies everything I see and hear, making it all very disorienting. Is that my reflection? I look like I am a child again. Trick of the eye, I guess.

The only voices that I seem to understand are always announcing gates, arrivals, departures. And they are paging me. Have I missed my connection? What time is it? Where am I supposed to be? I’ve gotta hurry! It’d be much easier if I wasn’t going the opposite direction of everyone else.  M u s t   m o v e   f a s t e r .

“MTM to Platform 4, MTM to Platform 4. Departure in two minutes”

Panic usually tastes of metal, like the fillings in my teeth, but in this place there is no such sensation. Only the echoing, the prisms, the kinetic frenzy. I keep catching my reflection out of the corner of my eye, but when I  turn to look I’m not there. I go around a corner and everyone is gone. It’s quiet. Another corner and suddenly I am back in the stream, but now everyone is going my way. The passage is narrowing and time is short as I try to fight my way to the front. Ahead is Platform 4; I can see it. The announcements continue but I’m not listening, focused on the glass door at the end of the passage.

“Last Call for Platform 4″

Just one more person to get ahead of, a little boy. I squeeze by just as I reach the door. I catch my reflection in the glass as I pass through it; where is the little boy?

The door slams shut. One seat is open. As the vessel lurches forward I slide in next to the girl by the window. “Hello” I say. “Hi” she says. It was a nice moment.

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