Dreams

Something a friend of mine said the other day got me thinking about dreams. I guess we all have dreams. Some of us have lots of them, and some have a few. Some change their dreams every few years and others hold onto their dreams for a lifetime. I've been thinking that maybe we can measure the effectiveness of our lives by the degree to which we have managed to fulfill our dreams. I've only had three real dreams in my life. I achieved one, one is dead, and one still may happen one of these days, though at my age the possibility grows more remote by the day.

The dream I achieved was to get a college education. I wanted that from my earliest days in junior high school. But even then I knew that the possiblity was out of reach. And so it proved to be for a while. I went into the work force as a secretary, got married, and had a couple of kids. Every year or so I'd get my hands on some college catalogues and would spend a couple of days happily planning all the wonderful classes I would take. After my ex retired from the Army he decided to go to college. He got his AA and then we decided to move to Pullman, WA for him to pursue a degree in Anthropology. A dream of his.

It wasn't a good year. We were scheduled to move in January and that December my father died. But we still moved. The following December my mother died. In between though I learned I could go to college using grants and loans because we didn't have much in the way of money. Just his retirement and his GI bill. Despite all of the trouble with family and the ultimate breakup of my marriage I successfully completed a degree in Journalism and a masters in Educational statistics over six years. I loved school. I'm proud to this day of having done this and it's meant a lot to my life. I wouldn't have ever been as successful as I became without my education.

My dead dream is to know what love feels like. Yeah, I persuaded myself I was in love with my ex, but when push came to shove, I found myself incapable of absorbing the amount of abuse he wished to dish out, and I walked. That's not love. After our breakup (we were married for 17 years) I was convinced that with all I had suffered, I would find a wonderful man, marry again, and live happily ever after. Yeah I know...I was stupid. Happily ever after only happens in fairy tales.

I almost killed myself wanting this so badly. It colored everything I ever did, thought, or wanted. I literally reached the point where my despair was so painful and so deep I contemplated suicide. Were it not for my children, I probably would have done it. I couldn't figure out what was so wrong with me. My friends cared about me too much too tell me, and I couldn't figure it out by myself. I saw women with much less to offer than I did with others. Finally I was faced with the most difficult decision of my life. I could ruthlessly and finally stamp out hope of finding love in my life once and for all, or I could wallow in abject misery for the rest of my days. I chose to get rid of the hope. That's not as easy as it might sound. Hope in an insidious little bugger. It hides in the damnest places and sneaks out at the damnest times.

I am proud to say I've been hope free for nearly ten years now. Am I happy? Well, no. But I'm not wallowing in freakish misery as I used to be either. I live in a sort of emotional numb spot. I rarely get angry, I even more rarely feel really sad and cry. It's a nice even sort of emotional place to be. It allows me to work and do other things, engage in hobbies, and to live my life rather than indulging in useless and painful introversion trying to find and fix whatever it is that make me nonexistent to members of the opposite sex. I've freely chosen this place, so I can't say as I have any room to complain.

My unfulfilled dream is to be a real writer. Well, I am a writer, sort of. I'm a technical writer. A damned good one at that. But my dream isn't technical writing, though it pays the bills and then some. My dream is to write books. I've written two screenplays and actually had someone want to buy one of them. That's another story for another day. I once was asked to develop an idea for a television series, and I got all the way to a face off with a series that was later produced. Given that I was an unknown quantity I was seriously honored to have gotten that far. I still have a lovely letter praising my talents from the studio. I wrote one very dreadful novel. To say it was horrid would require it to improve quite a bit. I've written a number of fairly decent short stories.

Right now I have a great idea for a fantasy novel, and actually have 14 chapters of it written, but I go for days, sometimes weeks and never touch it. Sometimes I write 5 or 6 pages as easily as sneezing, then spend a week agonizing over a single page. The writing in this is good. Over the years I've gained the ability to objectively evaluate my own work, and that of others. Well, some of the writing is good. And the ideas are original and allow me a range of themes and ideas and adventures. I have enough ideas backed up to continue writing unabated for the rest of my life.

The problem is that I'm not really pushing myself to work on it. I haven't mentioned that I rarely sleep more than 2-3 hours in a row. Rarely that much but I have been known to sleep that long. I'm tired all the time. I joke that it's ok because the world isn't really ready for me with a full head of steam. Sometimes I wonder if this exhaustion isn't why I cannot seem to find the energy to write. So it remains up in the air as to whether or not I'll ever see this dream come true. However, in a way it's my oldest and most enduring dream. It's the first thing I remember ever wanting to do, and the desire is just as strong as I write this as it was when I was in my teens or even earlier.

I've no way of telling if I have had fewer or more dreams than an average person. I suspect have had far fewer. Dreaming hurts. So I leave you with my favorite aphorism: Expect nothing. That way you're not suprised when that is what you get.