Questions in the dark

“Why don’t I ever see you dancing?”

I was asked that in a dream last night and it has been bouncing around my head all day.

Now I know that I have talked about my dreams before and I can never tell if people want to hear about them or not. Dreams are always much more interesting to the person who lived them than to someone who is forced to listen to something that is by its nature nonsensical. However, for the past few weeks I have been having these vivid dreams with similar elements and I just have to talk about the one I had last night. Very seldom do you wake up from a dream and wonder if you are now in reality.

I won’t go into the first half of the dream, which involved a horrible dinner in Vegas, my using a street luge as a means of transportation (very poorly as I crashed into a building) and my getting a lift to my old grade school in some guy’s car. That was all interesting and rather vivid but instead of ending up at the school I ended up at the British Museum. Specifically, the British Museum in 1998 as all of the scaffolding was up for the construction of the Great Hall. Exactly how we drove from the Chicago suburbs to London and back in time in one fell swoop is beyond me.

Obviously, by this point I realized it was a dream and kept on telling myself to wake up. Things were very vivid at this point. I could feel the wooden handrails as I walked up the stairs and the rain pelting me as I kept on trying to break myself from the dream. It was still as real as any workday morning. I then found myself lying on a bench, trying to protect myself from the rain when I noticed someone was doing the exact same thing right next to me. And while we can question my subconscious here I was certain that this is the person who is in charge of Everything. After a bit of small talk he asked me, “Why don’t I ever see you dancing?”

It wasn’t a critique of my life. It wasn’t a charge that I was wasting my days on a fool’s errand. It was one of genuine interest and almost a suggestion. Why is it that I can’t bring myself to dance?

Of course I don’t mean this in the physical sense though even in that sense I don’t dance. I blame my lack of coordination and my self-conscious streak for that nugget of my personality. But I think that is part of the point. I can never relax and just dance. Screw whoever is watching me if they think I look like an idiot. If I’m enjoying myself why should I care what someone else thinks?

But I don’t work that way. I live life with a look of grim determination. I’m so used to being a fighter and having to struggle for all of my accomplishments that I can never let it all go. My shoulders are always tensed, always on guard for the next challenge. I can’t say that this has been a bad way to go through life. Almost all of my success is due to the fact that I will simply outwork and outhustle people. It just leads to a life where you can never relax. Even when I went out to the bar on Saturday night I hunkered down on my stool, eyes scanning the room, my hand always inches from my beer on the off chance that someone might try to reach for it.

I don’t dance in my life. I’m 35 years old and the times where I just went out and celebrated the fact that I am alive, that despite the fact that the world around me is horribly flawed it is still the most amazing thing that one can ever imagine being part of, are few and far between. I’ve always been serious. I’ve always been focused on accomplishing the task in front of me. Now I have people in my dreams asking me if that really is all there is. And I have to say, I’m pretty sure that they are right.