Third Land

During the day I live in a world of expectations and uphill battles, and at night…it is more of the same. Hills become steeper, expectations become greater, and roles become mixed into a melange of what I understood them to be before sleep and what I learn to understand from them when I’m awake. New enemies and old friendships become lost in each new world that is created each night, and the line of what is right and wrong is so obscured that you don’t really understand what was happening until after the fact. Then you know the regrets or triumphs, and never before you’re already out of that world and back into reality.

In my most recent dreams, I’m in a land of nearly sheer cliffs, though the setting seemed largely rural. I moved from house to house, meeting with people I have known in my life that, to me, didn’t seem to have the hugest impact at the time - an unlikely lover, a lost friend, people I’ve seen at a passing glance, and even people I have never met, no doubt compilations of different ideas and concepts mixed up in my sleeping mind. The hard to understand part in this dream (and the main subject of this post) were the nearly impossible to scale sidewalks that separated these houses and people.

But scale I did, as painstaking as it was for me at the time.At each house I would comment on the difficult task it was to get there, but the residents would pay no mind and continue with whatever thing they were going to talk to me about - aspects of my life that have long since passed: school, childish pranks, minor annoyances, accomplishments, and failures. Like many others may have dreamed before, the concept of not being able to move quickly, or even at a normal pace, is a familiar idea for dreams - it is the idea of not going through life at the same pace as your peers or how you feel you should be going in comparison to others. Sometimes this feeling is achieved by not being able to run, being forced to crawl up hills, or even the feeling of free-falling off a sheer surface, losing any ground you may have gained; this is the concept of failure and inadequacy.

As I progressed up the hill, I eventually came to the understanding that the summit would eventual level out and it would become downhill from here. However, the reverse side of this world doesn’t end at a downhill jam, but rather a leveling off of layers, far less steep than what was just overcome. I didn’t make it very far down before I awoke, but the message was understood -

Life is a series of uphill battles in a search for normalcy and steady living. You go to school, you work and earn money, you make relationships (both sexual and friendly) in an attempt to create some sort of meaning, and when most of those are achieved, life becomes a slow downhill ride filled with good experiences and anecdotes. Dreams are there to create complications and sometimes a greater understanding of events in your life, that, if you’re lucky, you’ll learn from. Dreams aren’t hindered by social concepts, because they create their own each time. Sometimes they follow real world standards, but many times they don’t.

The purpose of this blog is to write down the various comings and goings of my own dreams to reach a better understanding of myself as a person and what identity I have created for myself. While I don’t doubt this will become another small voice in the crowded stadium that is the internet, I feel that writing down your thoughts publicly is a lot more lethargic than milling over them by yourself. I have dubbed my dream world Third Land, a world that isn’t like our own or even what it could be, but everything that it isn’t and allows me to achieve what I cannot in a fashion that would either be unacceptable in the world, or just plain impossible.