Originally written in the fall of 2005, this piece explains where the name of the site originated from. In case anyone was ever really curious!
This will be a quick one today. It's saturday afternoon, and while it's not a Hangover Weekend at all, I was still out almost the whole night--once again, trying to fool my body and the world that I can still live some rudimentary example of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle or something....sigh....sad.
And yes, there is another side of me that says "Why are you explaining the title of your new column on your SECOND issue, and not your first?" Well, it's my column, I make the rules, and I break the rules as I deem fit anyway.
"Dreaming Life" is one of those slightly abstract phrases that kinda ran threw my head a few months back, where the words just sound right when they get said or something. You have to understand, while I might devote my energies as a "sort-of" writer now in life, ten years back, I devoted most of my literate energies towards being a singer / lyricist, with emphasis on the lyricist, and so when in you're in the craft, you spend a lot of time thinking about how words SOUND together. "Dreaming Life" happens to be one of those phrases that I will turn around and around, enjoying the sound of it first, THEN deciding what exactly the fuck it's supposed to mean.
The first thing that struck me was its depiction of the vague interpretations of life's reality (in that whole existentialist / Aristotelian / Immanuel Kant "what is reality" type of way I suppose). How is it we determine what is our "Waking Life" and what is our "Dreaming Life". Which one would we rather be in. It's like that line in David Cronenbeg's The Fly : "I was a Fly, who dreamed he was a man...but the dream is over. And now the Fly has awakened." Or Kafka's short story about the guy who wakes up one day and realizes he's a cockroach.
Yeah, I know, these are the things that run through my mind while I'm busy making sure 144 units of weight loss capsules are being shipped to Wal-mart on time at work. It's that dualism that I have to live in order to avoid snapping usually.
And that's another aspect to the phrase "Dreaming Life". More accurately put, it's one of those ideas about "Dreaming OF Life", or how we interpret what our life is in our minds "supposed" to be about. Most of our lives are so profoundly ordinary, that its ordinariness becomes extraordinary. Most of the time, I can break my days down to a list of five or six major facts, and they don't even deviate in order: Woke up, got ready for work, went to work, worked late, came home, wasted time (i.e. watched tv, read e-mail, played "Age of Empires" for three straight hours), went to bed.
Rinse and repeat.
So, as Neil Peart wrote in "Losing It": "Most of us just dream about / The things we'd like to be". Or, to borrow another of his quotes: "It's understood / By every single person / Who'd be elsewhere if they could..."
Most lives are lived with inebriating regularity, only punctuated by moments of true real excitement or uniqueness, and most often, when those moments of genuine difference arise, we don't even like dealing with them. The highlights that exist outside of the normal framework of everyday life initially take on the form of a problem. "I was on my way to work, and I got into a car accident." "At work today, I got repeatedly kicked in the balls by corporate up in Toronto who can't ever get their shit together." "So this fracas breaks out in the bar, and I get blindsided in the back of the head by this beer bottle, even though I didn't have anything to do with it."
The things in life that break up the monotony are usually not that good! Every now and then, you might get one of those bones like "I talked with Vince, and we're going to open for Ron Hawkins on the 29th!" in your lifetime, or "I met this woman who is the first genuinely interesting person I've met in about a year and a half." But most of the time those events get followed up by grisly details that only end up as more fucking issues as well...i.e. "Vince only wants to pay us thirty dollars for the set," or "It also turns out that really interesting girl is on meds for bipolar disorder." You get the idea.
So it's the "Dream of Life" that we still surround ourselves with. We have a tendency to get by imagining what we think our lives could be, or ought to be. Invariably the "Dream of Life" leads to things like existential angst or the more pedestrian mid-life crisis. That whole problem of climbing a ladder only to discover once at the top that you're up against the wrong wall.
Albert Camus once wrote: "I'll tell you a secret about judgement day, my friend. It happens every day."
I used to keep that tacked up on my refrigerator. But the sad fact of the matter is, if we were to stop and judge our lives on a day to day basis, the gross and unforgiving normalcy would leave us feeling very guilty. And even those who live out what we would consider our "Dream Life" find themselves in a litany of regularity all their own (want a hint? Even rock stars live a pretty hum-drum life most of the time. If you ever followed a musician around on tour, you would see their day broken into a routine itinerary that anyone living a "normal" life would identify with--they just live on a bus for 260 days a year). Again, as Neil Peart once wrote (and I've got to stop quoting him in this piece): "Well, you get up, and you go to work." He has found that to be true from the days when he was schlepping tacky souvenirs on Piccadilly Circus all the way to now, when he's making records, writing books, and going on tour with millions in his accounts.
In effect, we are all busy "Dreaming Life" in the verb form, trying to distinguish what that's supposed to be, or what that really is, in its noun form.
Talk Hard,
The Professor
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