Monday, October 8, 2007

Internal or External?

Recently I've been giving a lot of thought to a long lost friend. Two of three nights, another person who has drifted away from me was in my dreams. I can't help but wonder if this is my own sub-conscious trying to purge the buffer of unresolved issues, or a message from the Cosmic WhatIf that for my own spiritual growth I must deal with these matters.

Last night was very disturbing, in many ways. My nocturnal bride didn't come to bed until well after midnight, and I had conked out well before it. After I got back to sleep, in my mind it was a warm summer night, and a social to-do was going on. I was thinking heavily on the subject of the late hour, and that I had been awoken at the late hour, and I knew I needed to get myself back to sleep so that I could be refreshed for the next day of work. Instead I was caught up in meetings with the aforementioned fragments of my social circle, and I watched with great concern as time ticked away, and I had only the time to actually go to work from the party. I began walking away from the place, and as I got to the boundary of this dreamscape, prepared to step on the street outside it's boundaries, I collapsed to sleep, waking up to realize an entire day had passed, and I had missed work while asleep.

I think I woke up somewhere in the middle of the party, checked my alarm clock, found it was an hour before I needed to get up, and returned to the same dream. Strange when that happens, makes it hard to figure whether you actually woke up. I remember the physical feeling of my body resting on the bed, sore from sleeping on one side for so long, so I think it was real, but there is no real certainty in it.

Back to the recurring thoughts of those I've left behind. It's October. This month is considered by many cultures to be a time of death, or more to the point, of transition through renunciation. I find myself wondering if this is a sign that I should seek resolution, but not to reclaim these friendships, simply to let them go. In both cases, letting them go altogether is a painful thought. Neither has given me a reason to think that holding on would be valuable, or good, but I've never had any skill with ending things.

In other news....

The job is going well. I'm actually able to do my work now, which is a huge relief in many ways. Spinning my wheels was driving me crazy. I'm making mistakes, but I'm also having successes. And anything I do wrong is currently being caught by my boss, and can be regarded as an essential part of the learning experience. Later when I begin working over the phone, without that safety net, should be interesting.

But their world has flat backgrounds and little need to sleep but to dream


1 comment:

The Mushroom said...

It's impossible for one person to correctly prescribe what another should do, especially when the advise is based on one's own experiences. Sometimes it flies, sometimes it blows up, sometimes it falls flat when a person tries to get back in touch with their past. I've had all the above because I've spent some time in the last couple years pushing buttons and trying to find my past.

You've likely read in my blogs and possibly heard through email about the girlfriend I had in 1984-1985 that I became reacquainted with this last March -- and walked away from in August. The summation is that the reason why I wanted to get back in touch with her for 20 years was because the separation left a lot of questions unanswered. As adults, she gave those answers and I understood them. And that's how I discovered I never really knew her in the first place... most of what I thought of her was incorrect.

I mourned being wrong for half my life for a day or three, then turned it onto its silver lining and realized that I had found what I had been looking for. Closure. Now I knew who she was then and is now. I found out what moved her when neither of us could have used words we could comprehend at the time. And those were the stated goals. I'm free now.

There was someone else I had done a similar dance about, who wasn't a girlfriend but in my estimation should have been, that I wanted to know what was on her mind during one pivotal moment where I took one fork in the road and she was on the other. I finally tracked her down, called her house a couple times and left messages just asking for contact, and got one email asking what my question was. I wrote it and said that I knew that the answer doesn't change anything about who we are now, but for my own sake I'd like to know whether I was right or wrong in what I perceived that Friday night in July 1983. She didn't reply. And I learned that it was my asking her the question, not its answer, that my mind really needed. Some say it was intrusive and selfish of me to inflict the question... but it was what I had needed to do to let go of the matter once and for all.

Be true to yourself, only you know what drives you to want to regain contact with these people, and if you find that you should do it rather than merely want to... make it so, it could save you from occasionally losing sleep thinking of these folks for decades to come.