My Infatuation with Dreams

So, generally I’ve talked about things that I’ve observed so far, but this time I feel you all should get to know about me some more. A little one on one, man to man, (or man to women I guess.) If you ever saw the majority of my poems and stories, you’d find a strange prevailing theme of dreams. And that’s because I have a strange infatuation with them. Not just mental goals and desires, but the unconscious world that exists only insides each person’s head. It’s incredible. The more you think about it, the feats are minds can accomplish. The fact that if we close our eyes and our mind creates an entire world while we’re asleep, we can travel it and if we fall and start to crash into the ground, our body literally jerks as a response. A reaction in reality from the fantasy. People that sleep walk and that have a much stronger reaction to their dreams in reality. I think that’s just crazy, brilliant, fantastic, and wonderful. For the longest time, especially when I was a kid (I’m still sort of a kid I suppose, but anyways,) I just didn’t want to even exist in this place we call earth. I didn’t see anything here I really wanted. What I wanted was unaccomplished in reality, and the only place I found them fulfilled and accomplished was in my dreams. And so I dream’t. That was my life. My creations, my world inside my head was my reality. Looking back, the reason I’m who I am comes a lot from those times. The dreams I would have motivated me later in a way that nothing else could. Because the sad thing about dreams is that they fade. They aren’t reality sadly, and so we move on and are told to forget about them. Dreams are made to appear as just a common thing everyone experiences, a silly night time inconvenience that can just be ignored and forgotten. Which is one thing I never wanted to do. I refused to forget my dreams whenever I had a choice. I would attempt to remember every detail, trying to relive the moment. Naturally, you can’t. That’s the tough part about it. But a part of me relives those moments when I write them down. I can feel the air and stone beneath my feet through the words I can place down on a computer screen or a piece of paper. And so I started writing them out. Because if it gave me the slightest indication of the worlds that existed in my dreams, I would do it within in instance.

Now that I’m older, I’m seeing myself have a harder time not only remembering dreams, but having them. Because the world gets so needy, so demanding, that it’s hard to get enough sleep, much less dream while doing it. The world becomes so massive that it demands every space of your mind, during the sleeping and waking minutes of your life. And so I’ve lost some of those dreams. And it’s been extremely traumatizing to me as I see it happen to me. But I know some of it’s necessary, because I’ve got to help everyone that’s here in reality as much as I can. With everything I have, I want to be able to help people, and if I simply slept and lived for my dreams, I wouldn’t be able to help others see their dreams and reach for them. If I could help other’s reach their potential and seek things that are more than the world and its physical pleasures, then it’s worth it, because I might not be dreaming, but my reality has a chance of looking a bit closer to my dream.

Anyways, that’s mostly the reason I’m infatuated with dreams. I’ve also found they can often tell you things about yourself and your life, which naturally makes me interested in them. My imagination has always been a bit rampant and uncontrollable at times, but it’s definitely a good thing. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I consider it a blessing that I’ve been given despite some of the frustrations that come with it. Remember the fact that I hate losing ideas and inspiration? Well I also really don’t like losing dreams and their feel. That sounds weird to say, but honestly when I think about it, each dream I have has some sort of feel to it. Let me give you some examples. So if I had a dream where it was somewhere I knew and had been before, it gives me a very familiar and comfortable feel. Usually I feel like I can accomplish things I normally couldn’t in these. When it’s somewhere that appears to be completely different from reality, so like I’m dreaming of another world kind of thing, I get a very curious feel that often is associated with a massive number of colors and sights to see. Once I could have sworn I even smelled and tasted some food during a feast in my dream, and it was this category of dream. The senses in general are emphasized here. When it’s an extremely peculiar setting, like a staircase set in darkness, or a sort of picture frame setting where I’m looking from above or something, I get a sort of wild, peculiar, important feeling. Like what I’m observing is significant. The colors and sights are the boldest in these settings, often some sort of architecture is set apart in my mind that I find. It’s interesting. Anyways, the whole point of that was to explain that sometimes I can remember a dream, but the feeling, the overall sense the dream gave to me can disappear, which is just as upsetting to me as forgetting a dream. Though, it is the thing that is brought back the strongest when I’m writing my dreams out.

This post has been a bit stranger than most. I guess I like dreams because I can hypothesize and experience them in a very strange way. They’re very mysterious, and I like that. Right, so I’ve made it a bit of a habit to add one of my poems to these, so here’s one about what I just talked about.

Forgetting sucks.

I did it again. I’m so original. Right, the actual one is below, sorry for being difficult.

A dream. The nightly vision from the heart. Not the kind of dream that’s sought after, but a dream that’s been lost after you wake up. A butterfly that escapes your grasp, and no matter how beautiful the animal is, it can’t be caught. Images that won’t ever be seen again. A simple vision. The only thing that can capture our hearts the best, and become manifest in our lives, even though we don’t remember half of them. Dreams. Like a lover who is forced away from us, only to be seen on rare occasions. A varying number of scenes, some with haunting consequences, and others with things we only could wish were real. And so we dream of them. Hoping for the scenes, imagining the picture perfect moments of joy. The time spent with a loved one. Seeing the lost return. Being accepted by the rejector. Dreams make these impossibilities or improbabilities reality. Or, so we think so for the moment. We can almost accept the fact that it’s happening. That if we pinched ourselves, we’d still be in that moment. Pinch. Awaken. Yet time and time again we awaken like this, to cruel reality, a crushing, excruciating pinch that feels more like being slapped. So we can’t handle it. We forget our dreams. They fade in the back of our heads as a memory forgotten. And sometimes, it works. We can get over it. We survive the day and keep moving. Forgetting the pinch. Forgetting the memories we might have had, the things we wish could be, because it just hurts too much. How could it be worth it? A man who lives in his dreams, can’t possibly live in his life. But a dream is the blooming of an idea, a thought. And when we refuse to remember it, we shrivel that thought up in an instant. Dreams are essential. They’re beautiful. They’re a piece of art. We should neither rely on them to live, nor should we rely on our lives to live without them. A beautiful romance between what is real, and what we wish was so. It’s only this thought that stops what we want to be real from actually being real. Obviously, this is not for everything. Flying is not possible without the proper equipment, guaranteed. And such is reality, the gravity that brings us back to earth. So that way we don’t get carried away on the wind that is our dreams.

Hoping you have sweet dreams,

Josiah Serravalle.

Ideas and Inspiration.

First of all: It’s Valentine’s day.

Well. It was when I wrote this. But now it’s kind of not.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on.

Yeah this post isn’t related to Valentine’s day in any way, though I do have some specific aspects of love that I want to talk about, I feel like today isn’t the day for it. So I’m going to talk about something else that I’ve been thinking about instead. Ideas, Inspiration, and the fact that I often forget them easily.

So essentially, I found it interesting first of all, that the creation of several great ideas don’t really depend on environments, even though they can be aided by them. For instance, I personally find that I think better and can get more ideas for some of my projects when I’m taking a shower. This may be random, but I’m seeking to provide the reason behind this happening, because that’s just what I do. (I’d like to make the distinction here that I’m talking about focusing and consciously coming up with ideas, and this is different from inspiration, which I’ll explain the difference later.) Though in essence, the environment of the shower isn’t what affects my increased mental productivity. It’s more of the fact that I’m not doing anything that requires a majority of my brain to accomplish, but I’m still keeping my mind occupied. For some reason, if you sit in a bathtub with the water running just to come up with ideas, there’s a difference between this and sitting in your room. And I think that this is more about the number of distractions you face and what you do in these environments than just the environments themselves. When you sit in your room, you legitimately aren’t doing anything, so naturally your brain picks up on the smallest things, making it harder to focus and come up with ideas. If I sat in my room, first of all my eyes would start picking up the minute patterns in the carpet, the messes I need to clean, the stain in my carpet, etc. So first of all I think better when I close my eyes, it decreases the number of distractions my mind creates. Without one of my senses being used, my brain starts to pick up the random sounds that are made all around me. My family talking in the other room, my mother folding laundry and the thump of clothes hitting the bed, the wind and animals managing to reach my ears through my windows, my dog being a complete punk, etc. So without being in complete silence, I naturally find it extremely difficult to think clearly on one subject while all that is running through my head. So essentially if you try that hard, it isn’t very effective. In general, I can’t say this applies to everyone, because everyone does their work, learns, and thinks differently. But I’m speaking from my own perspective. And for me, I put on music, because it keeps my ears distracted so they don’t bother my brain, I either have my eyes focus on a fixed point that keeps me from being bothered or I occasionally close them, and then I start writing. Because if I don’t write things as I come up with them I forget them. And this is why I feel like the shower brings out my ideas the best, because essentially it distracts all your senses enough that your mind is free to romp without restraints. The sweet sounds of the water against the floor keep your ears from really hearing anything else, your appendages are cleaning you, your eyes can only really look at curtains and blank walls, and in this case I think better when I close my eyes, fulfilling the things needed in order for my mind to fully frolic as much as it needs to. The downside is I often end up taking near 30 minute showers. Yeah, it’s bad. I call it the 30 minute power shower, but that doesn’t make my family any happier when they have to wait a whopping 30 minutes to get into the shower. Of course, the one problem with this is I can’t write my ideas down while in the shower. So unfortunately, either because of ADHD, or just poor memory, I forget a lot of my ideas. (I’m not sure if I really have ADHD, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. Honestly, sometimes I really wonder.)

This brings me to my number one pet peeve that frustrates me to no end. That is when my ideas get lost in the abyss that is my poor memory. I’m pretty sure my brain is like a giant rain forest with huge trees that reach nearly a hundred feet tall and several feet in diameter. This rain forest of course would make too much sense without some rivers, streams, creeks, sink holes, lakes, and plenty of mines that hide all the things I lost and want the most. It genuinely really aggravates me a lot when I lose a thought, an idea, a character, or even a place that I thought up in my head. I’ll sit there for several moments as it sits on the tip of my tongue, just teasing me at how close it is to being re-discovered, only to fall back into the abyss again. I wrote a poem that describes this experience in the best way I could find.

It sucks.

Oh wait, that’s not my poem. But it still really works. Just kidding, here’s the actual poem.

A story unwinds in your head, a man, a woman, a world unknown and unbeknownst to you. Locked in your head, but unlocked in your imagination. Something triggers in your head like a key. Desperation and curiosity overcome your senses as you push the key into a lock. You turn it, only to stop halfway. Madness. Regret. Something inside of you stops. You grasp at the key. Furling your hand into a fist around the key. Brute strength fails you. The key refuses to turn. Anger explodes from your chest, an innermost monster rages. You shut out your senses, refusing to let go of the key, of the moment, of the world inches away from being unlocked. Then, a sound, a smell, a sight, a person. All of a sudden you let go. A free fall. The moment is lost forever. The key falls between your fingers into oblivion.

Often times I find that a varying of very simple normal things are what brings me out of my creative stupor. As stated in the poem, something as simple as a sound, a smell, a sight or a person can completely interrupt my thoughts and make me lose them completely.

So my favorite book, probably of all times, is The Great Gatsby, (This does correlate to something, so shhhh.) because for one, I love good quote, two I LOVE imagery, and I feel like The Great Gatsby accomplishes this so wonderfully it stuns me at times. The themes behind the book and some other things in it are just brilliant and make me want to read it over and over again. (I like to read a lot of books, so the fact that I say this is my favorite is saying something.) There’s a quote from it that essentially sums up how I feel every time I lose some of my inspiration. I’d like to share it with you guys. (I’ll probably include more Gatsby quotes in my later posts as well, because it’s the best.)

“Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something–an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was incommunicable forever.”

Yeah. Brilliant. I forget too many things. Though generally the senses don’t make me lose my thoughts, but my inspiration. Which is different. This post is getting long, but I’m gonna keep going. Alright.

Inspiration is different from what I described in the first paragraph, where I talked about the best ways to be able to put yourself in a thinking state of mind. Inspiration is very dependent on your environment, and what your senses are picking up. I feel like I don’t really ever get inspiration in the shower, but I certainly think more. However, if I sit outside at the park where kids are playing, and I close my eyes just to hear their laughter and open them again to see the kids’ smiles just to understand child like faith and joy, that I would consider inspiration. There’s no other place where you’ll experience exactly what you experienced that moment which gave you certain thoughts or even a revelation. A revelation may be achieved through thought, but can also be uncovered quicker through inspiration. When you sit under the stars and the massive extent of stars draws you into a stupor, you can get inspired. This is quite different from the mental process of creating ideas, which essentially shuts out the senses to make room for more thought. Though, the interesting part is that they can occasionally acquire the same ideas. If you’re taking a shower, and start thinking about how black holes exist and work, and work through a majority of thought processes to reveal a conclusion, you can accomplish the same thing if you stare out into the stars one night, and are hit with inspiration about black holes. However, I feel like there are some things that inspiration can accomplish and cover that thought processes can’t always figure out, though inspiration can always accomplish what thought processes in the shower can. For instance, if you are a physicist studying black holes, and you’re taking a shower and getting ready for work, you’re restrained by the rules you’ve learned and set in your mind from the things you’ve observed, and therefore your thought process is bound to a certain extent. However, when you actually observe something that you’ve seen a hundred times, but suddenly see that it works in such a way that it was like a black hole, you can understand them in a way everyone else bound by their own mind couldn’t figure out. (I’m not really sure where I was going with that example, but whatever, hopefully you get the point.)

Alright, that was long. It’s late, and I should get some sleep.

Hoping you had a lovely Valentine’s Day,

Josiah Serravalle