Up, slighty before 6am, hotel room

(06:34:10 CDT)

Up, slighty before 6am, hotel room

It is just shy of 6am as I write this. The day has potential to be gorgeous. The clouds of last night are broken up, a bright champagne sunlight is seeping through the cracks, and every time you look outside, the condition is a little more "mostly sunny". I slept "ok". Five hours, give or take. Only woke up once and that was the time where I woke up with the fair certainty that I would not be going back to sleep, at least probably not, because by time I did it would be late to be asleep long before I had to get up anyhow (about half an hour from now). I sleep mediocrely in hotel rooms, which seems better than most of my friends. Sarah seems to sleep the best, good old fashioned pass outs with naps on top. Eh.

The class I am down here for is "Young Adult Materials and Servicess". I think that's the right class title. I am very much of the Academic and Reference style, my librarian heart beats with information retrieval, puzzling out obscure chemistry terms, century-old Russian diplomats, and the various mysteries and vanities (of which, all is) of LexisNexis. However, school is never about merely studying what you do, or, optimally, shouldn't be; and this class is one of those that should be different for me. I do read some young adult materials. Not a lot. One of my classmates misunderstood me to say that I preferred young adult literature to adult literature. This is not true. What I said is that adult literature, the good kind of adult literature, is mostly amoral and anti-mythic. It reexamines the archetype of literary being not as some grand being representing the best, and worst, of humanity on a quest; but often some everyman with everyday flaws whose quest is to just come to grips with what he lost. We used to find things in literature, now we just realize that something is missing. Young adult literature is one of the few places where that age-old mythic, along with its consequences come back. Lost things can be found, again, if you pay the price. That was what I said. I am interested in young adult literature because it has that mythic quality of consequences. I still prefer, though, my my weird Borgesian tales; the sort of thing that YA-lit usually does poorly.

Speaking of class, I need to get some reading done and some breakfast in me. Before I go, let me share the dream that I just had. I have lots of dreams. I one time guessed as many as 5-8 a night. Less now. 3-5. Maybe? How average is that? My dreams often reference one another, so most nights I have 2-3 ur-dreams and each one has a couple of parts. I have talked about the average shape of my dreams before. The labyrinthine buildings, the ancient catehdrals, the enclosed city streets, the deep woods whose paths must be followed, the old country roads with their secrets. As if the whole world was enclosed in something, and most freedom was merely turning the same twists and turns as any maze-solver is aiming for. My dreams often have some sort of monster, which of course is the labyrinth's beast, the minotaur if you will, who stalks the dream Doug and causes the whole thing of having a sense of finality. I move towards the end because going back, stopping, or sidetracking is asking for the monster to get closer. I feel bad for those who claim to control their dreams. My dreams are uncontrollable, but often have plot twists, split second decisions (I can and do die in my dreams, just as often I am forced to kill in my dreams or do something else equally as drastic), and moments of real terror. My dreams, most of the time, are technically nightmares but the sense of doom, the sense of being haunted, the monsters and the darkness does not really bother me in the dream world. It feels...natural. At any rate, if I could control the dreams I might make the beast go away, I might make the walls of the labyrinth cease. Both of those would be rather poor endings.

In this dream, the one that I woke up from at 5:30am in a Gadsden hotel room, Sarah had been asked by her mom to come down to some bar that her mom had either opened on hard influence at. I think. I cannot remember the first part. Her mom had her interview, promised Sarah all sorts of things and how awesome the job would be, and then after it was said and done with, turned out that she was trying to force Sarah to work some menial job where she could control Sarah, and Sarah would never have financial idependence. A rather "cliche" dream about parents, in many ways. I got angry, and told her that holding her daughter down, controlling her money just so that her daughter would always have to come back to her, was a fool's game and it would be best to just let it go, to let the daughter come back on her own. My mother-in-law got really upset, acted really heart broken, and left.

At this point in time, the dream became more of a normal Doug dream, and we realized that she was going to do something horrible. Her potential action became the beast of the dream. Getting back and home before she could do this action would make everything better. Except, this time, our home was at the end of a literal labyrinth and the labyrinth had traps, misdirection, and puzzles to solve. Most of the dream was me trying to come to grips with the various puzzles while in a hurried state of mind. For whatever reason, I was well ahead of Sarah at several key bits and so things that should have had two people solving, I tried to do on my own. About the time I woke up, I was dangling several feet off the floor, my hands sweaty and slipping, and trying to figure out a way to get into this one doorway that was up the wall. I think the dream required me to let go and fall, back down to where Sarah currently was, in order to solve that puzzle. I had chosen poorly and so had to restart if you will, except the restart was going to involve risking injury.

Which is all to say, I guess, that the dream was some sort of weird allegory about marriage, about moving beyond parents not really wanting to let go? About trying to solve the puzzle of how to get to a home that is comfortable to you? About the real results of screwing up? I have no idea where that dream came from. I know the bar was probably a result of a tv show I watched that includes a bar as a regular scene. The rest? Who knows.

Anyhow, time to do some readings, or get some biscuits and gravy in me. Mmmm. One of those things.

Si Vales, Valeo

• See other entries for August 09
• See Journal Archives (sorted by year then month)