The dream

A few days back I posted a blog piece on the dilemma faced in being true to your ideals and values, while also having to pay the bills (The good, the bad and the ugly-november 2011). This is a dilemma I am facing and the night I posted the blog piece I asked for guidance to come to me in a dream.

The dream.... It was long, vivid and so real. I was looking at buying a house and came across a very large city apartment. My first impressions were 'no'.. not enough windows, it is claustrophobic, not what I am looking for.. and the outside traffic noise is very loud. But then I saw some good features; lots of cupboards and storage space (yes I am a practical gay man!), the rooms were very large, and location was convenient. Though it wasn't really what I wanted, I began to sell it to myself by focusing on the good points and how I do need a place to live and if I wait too much longer... then what?.... I might not find anything better etc... Then something odd happened, my friend Mark appeared. Mark was a dear friend who passed away five years ago this November. He was as always 'there for me' and here he was now accompanying me on a second trip to check out the apartment, where I seemed to be selling it to myself more and more... Mark stopped me and in a friendly and caring way he highlighted all of the negative aspects of the apartment and asked me why I was settling for it, when it was obviously not what I was looking for. I looked at Mark, his words of wisdom ringing in my ears and my folly slowly dawning on me. I was silent, thinking, staring ahead at Mark dressed in his handyman's overalls. The window behind him framed his kindly and unassuming stance. 'That is so you', I thought and then I found myself remembering how much he had been there for me in the past and how much we had loved each other. He was right and had told me what I knew but for some reason was scared to see. At that moment. the bright morning sun flooded in behind him, creating an angelic effect. He smiled in that warm, supportive way, never patronisingly, though he was often right and then he disappeared in the brightness.

I awoke with the word 'settling' in my mind and a lyric from Neko Case wafting through the air "...you thought that you could outrun sorrow... '. It all comes together now. Once more I settle out of fear. This isn't for me. It isn't terrible or wrong, but it is not inline with my values and ideals. I am just settling, because I do need to pay the bills and this was all that was there. I feared that if i didn't take it, nothing else would have come along. An image of trying to outrun something unseen or unknown is conjured... Sometimes fear stops us from waiting.  We take what we can to get us through, to survive..to outrun what is unknown, be it sorrow, pain, poverty.. the list goes on. But if we were to bravely wait...then what? Something better? Something marvelous or magnificent? What if this is the best there is? Or in thinking this, are we too scared to dream? Too fearful to realise our ideals?


Neko Case- 'Magpie to the morning'