Dream a little dream

Last night I had this dream.  Despite attempts to not dwell on it, the fact that I could find out about the graduate program soon has been on my mind.  So, along with a number of other things that I don't have any control over in my life, I was thinking about that and I had one of those really long dreams last night.

The bit I want to share because I am bored and like to pretend like people read my blog, involved a number of my friends here in Salt Lake.  Along with hundreds of people, we were in this building like you would see in a futuristic movie where everyone has to live together.

 It wasn't a bad feeling but I had no idea what we were doing there.  One by one, my friends were called to go do this test.  They were all chill about it and acted like they knew what it was all about.  The only reason I wasn't freaking out was because Krista Kendall was so confident about it.  And I thought, "If she isn't worried about all the millions of things this could be then I definitely don't have to be." And while I hung out, I saw some of them come back.  I had no idea what we were doing.  When it was finally my turn (curse alphabetical order . . . ) I went forward and was led to this floor that opened into the ocean.  I was supposed to climb into this one-man submarine and be taken hundreds of miles away and dropped off.  Alone.  As I was about to shut the door, I asked "So will I make it back here alive?"  And the guy said, "If you make it back, it means you are in the graduate program."

Fully feeling like I was going to either drown because the submarine would be faulty, or die of suffocation, I nodded and shut the door and let them take me.  When I was dropped off in the middle of the ocean the last thing I heard was someone back at the main building saying through my gadgety sub "Now don't worry, we will control your machine.  You just sit tight."

So I just floated through this endless sea for hours while someone controlled my fate. The thing is, I didn't know what the alternative was if I didn't make it into the program.  
Claustrophobia?

Death by marine animal attack?

Davy Jones Locker?

Or that the controllers would forget me.  Or all of my friends would never see me again, that I would somehow fail where they hadn't.  But mostly, I just felt weird that I didn't know about this in advance and that I was in my pajamas, without a bra--which always unnerves me in a dream.  But REALLY, I felt peace.  And this resolve to die if it was asked of me or to live if it was asked of me.  After that, my mind became as still as the sea around me and lost in the hours.

This peaceful, mindless floating, finally ended, and I emerged from the depths.  The controllers opened my door and I met the same guy as before.  He told me that I was admitted into the graduate program and that my scores were among the highest.  He said I had never had anything to worry about, there was no way I would have been rejected.  My other life problems (besides being braless) were also seemingly resolved.

So I am privileged to be in my own mind all day, and let me say, it hasn't been calm for months.  And I feel crazy, unsettled, panicked, and exhausted at most hours of the day.  And then it switches to elated, joyous, hopeful, and just accepting the rest of the time.  From this dream one may learn that despite my extremely vacillating mind when I am awake:

I have got
the
MOST
hopeful,
kick-butt,
"nam myoho renge kyo"
sub-conscious.

Sometimes . . . I think

So I LOVE TED.  I have a few videos that I watch over and over as coping strategies for when my brain needs  help.  I also have a lot of journals.  And I almost started a new one today just to write down a few things about this TED talk and I said to myself, "THIS IS GETTING OUT OF HAND! YOU CANNOT HAVE A TED JOURNAL." So I went to the blog instead.  But I still might start a TED journal.

The talk called Who am I? does not have anything to do with the numbers 24601 or Jean Val Jean.  It is a great, short talk about one of the ways we discover who we are.  He talks about imitation.  Children are programmed to imitate, it is how they learn to become.  All of Hetain Patel's artwork deals with the concept of identity.  His discovery is that identity is "an ever-shifting game of imitation."  As children, who did we imitate?  As students, workers, adults?  As humans, who do we imitate and whose identity did we want from the beginning?

He also uses a word that is very significant in my life: failure.  To me, sometimes failure is like this giant rock that is constantly with me, magnetically engineered to stay by me.  It is heavy and I am scared of it.  I have tried throwing it away from me, leaving it behind, climbing over it, hiding under it, dragging it, kicking it, ignoring it, romanticizing it, philosophizing it, embracing it . . . The reality is that failure is a fact of life.  And I really love life.  I liked this video because he talks about failure in a way that I have never considered.  Sometimes, or always, the human conditions that seem to weaken us the most are the ones that lead us to the discovery of who we truly are.  And when we know who we are, I believe we can overcome anything.