I'm not quite sure what I should think about the new year; as I watched the footage of the ball finally reaching its position at the bottom of the New Year's pole in New York, watching the massive crows swaying in unison in Times Square as music blared over loud speakers, couples kissing under the light of giant illuminated billboards, I just wasn't sure what to make of it. Sure, I was there, watching it with my mom, my dad, and my two younger brothers, the four closest people to me, but after we hugged and celebrated, holding hands to pray for strength, courage, and good fortune in the new year, I looked back at the TV, and just couldn't help but feel unfulfilled. It was like being the writer and director of a movie, and just before you had the chance to get your final scene put together, the producers took all your material from you, and released it unfinished, incomplete.
I thought back to 2009 and looked at all the things I had tried my luck at, only to come out disappointed, worn down, and without any gains. It was like a bad year in the stock market. I put in all kinds of work, all kinds of effort, only to be met with a less-than-equal return. It almost feels like wasted effort. Now surely, one would assume that I did learn some things in the process, and yes, I guess you could say I learned plenty of new things about myself, about other people, but at what cost? Well to me, it seems that I have paid way too much to only receive such a small gain. As much as I may feel I have learned, I had to pay up with time and effort, something you and I can never gain back. I'm one year older, which means one year has passed, which means I just have that much time left. Yes, I have my whole life ahead of me, but one chapter, one of the most crucial ones, is already a little more than halfway through. In less then two years, I will have graduated and will be looking for a job at who knows where. These are my final opportunities to meet more great people in the relatively relaxed environment of college, in contrast to the stress and uneasiness that comes from becoming a part of the workforce, becoming another small gear in the much larger machine, a machine which, by the way, downplays the significance of each of its individual parts. But enough, about that, I was supposed to talk about nightmares.
I've been having a lot of really odd dreams lately; I struggle even to refer to them as such, in fact, looking back, they were all actually nightmares. Most of them, I can't remember anymore, but I do remember waking up sharply on a number of occasions to the unbearable discomfort that would often haunt me in my sleep. The past two I recall carrying the themes of powerlessness. Just the other night I dreamed that three burglars entered the house after one of my brothers naively opened the door for them and let them in. As they rummaged through the drawers of the house that, as time went on, gradually began to resemble my own less and less, I plotted to take out all three of them, with a butcher knife I had found in the kitchen. I approached the first one from behind, but as my mind commanded my arm to swing out in one of the most violent acts I could possibly ever conceive, I could feel my muscles resisting my commands. You know when you first wake up in the morning and you try to make a fist with your hand, but it just feels really weird, almost like your hand is trying to resist this action? Well that's what my entire right arm felt like in the dream; in fact, to an extent, my entire body felt that way. As I commanded the swing into the assailant's skull, the action, if any, would come with an involuntary reluctance, for which I could only imagine why it existed. Despite this peculiar, underlying protest, the blow would eventually land, right in the man's skull, leaving a large, clean incision in the top of his head. But despite this, he continued to rummage through a drawer of old phone books and different types of tape. No scream, no physical reaction, nothing. "Nevermind," I thought to myself, "he's already got a huge gash in his head, I need to go take out the other two." So I moved across the first floor to the other side of a rather malformed, distorted, expanded version of our kitchen to find the other two bandits looking through two adjacent drawers. I approached the first one from behind on his right, and quickly landed two blows into the man's head, feeling the same bizarre sense of muscular reluctance before the act was actually completed. I recall looking at the two lacerations in the clean-cut skull, seeing the lines drawn through the man's hair which resembled the neat cuts into a tray of brownies, the whole thing a nearly bloodless ordeal, and before I could attack the third thief, I found myself telling the story of what had just happened to a friend as we sat at a table in my garage, glasses of water in hand, as the sun went down outside. It wasn't until much later that I would wake up to realize I had just had a dream within a dream.
But now comes the most significant tale of this entry, the one from which I woke up from a little over an hour ago. I recall a number of things from this one, some of them actually quite nice, at first, anyway. It was the start of a new quarter. New classes, new people; I found myself in a different part of the UC Davis campus, assuming it even was the campus which I have become so familiar with over the past 2 years and 1/4. Everything seemed tremendously distorted, as they always do in dreams. Nevertheless I made acquaintance with a number of new people, every single one of them were girls. While talking to a particular one about the classes she was taking, I remember complimenting her, and as I watched a smile appear on her face, I heard one of those weird theme sound effects that always plays in TV shows and movies and videogames when the character has a defining moment with another person. That ascending, high-pitched sound of running your finger through the metal rods of a wind chime from left to right. Everything suddenly becomes soft-focus and you see the smile appear on her face, and you just feel rewarded, like you put in just a little bit of effort, or what to you seems like very little effort, and the rewards, the return, the feeling of gratification stretches farther than the eye can see, greater than your heart has ever felt. I felt a euphoria rush through my entire body. Clearly there was something different about this girl; she was incredibly receptive and even more responsive, something you don't come across often. In the eyes of a person who studies cognition, my bloodstream was a dopamine gold mine and my rewards system was through the roof. Everything felt great. For once I felt like I had made some visible progress. As we sat and continued to converse, I saw someone walk by, looking at us talking. I wasn't sure who this was, but she seemed familiar enough, wearing an upset look on her face for reasons that were completely beyond me. I would eventually find her later, and she would appear as cracked-out, lost, and confused; I'm not even sure if it was the same person, but I remember seeing her, the same person that glanced at me earlier, in the first instance, looking away for a moment, and returning my eyes to a reformed, deformed version of the same person.
Before I knew it, I was in another sequence. I was in a house, I'm not sure who's house, but it was very close to the street side with a large window facing the road outside. A car pulls up, a Lexus ES300, judging from the familiar-to-me two-tone paint. The doors open. A girl steps out. Reflexively I turn to my right to my brother who is standing by the stairs, and say to him, "Dude, isn't that your girlfriend?" "Huh?" he replies, looking out the window. I recall going into their garage, which looked more like an attached greenhouse, with its intensive glass window walls, plants scattered here and there with pillars to support the roof and a car parked in the middle. I felt the need to switch from the athletic shorts I was wearing into my jeans, so as to appear more formal. The began to pour in through the front door.
And then a new sequence. I was on top of an oddly-constructed structure between what seemed like Wellman Hall and Kerr Hall, I recognized the brick edifices. I climbed on top of it, and for some reason I reasoned with myself that I had been sent there to create a scene by committing some civil disobedience. I was told that some riot police were going to arrive, and surely enough, a group of aptly-dressed riot police arrived. I was to create a diversion of some sort. I was the lone civilian in the area, in fact it seemed like the only people in the whole world were myself and these riot police. As one pulled up, stopping in the middle of several randomly-dispersed police-spec, all black Dodge Chargers, he got out of his car and began to remove a over-sized shotgun from a gun case on top of his vehicle, it almost actually seemed like his entire car just turned into a gun case after he got out?, I turned to the opposite side of the building and looked down to find several other, unmanned security vehicles parked around the courtyard. In what suddenly began to feel like something out of some Grand Theft Auto-Assassin's Creed mash-up, I jumped from the top of the building, escaping the cop's line of sight, with the intention of stealing one of these cars and driving away. However I decided I didn't have the capacity or the time to smash out one of the windows and attempt to start the car because I didn't have any keys and I had no idea how to hot wire a car. So after landing I just began to run. I ran out past Wellman to find myself in what looked like someone's backyard, eventually reaching a dead end where I was surrounded by high wooden fence and the stucco-covered wall of a house. I then decided to climb over the fence and began running along the other side of the house. My phone starts ringing. It's my brother. He tells me something about my grandparents and their expensive new Vizio flatscreen HDTV. "That's great." I say. "I'll talk to you later, yeah?" I quickly hung up and continued to run. I eventually went into a door on the side of the house, which led me into a room which resembled a tool shed and a crude bedroom, at which point I assumed that I had escaped from my pursuers. Suddenly I felt a rush of danger, and as I sprung for the door to leave, it opens inward, and a man with a gun enters the room. I quickly turned around and put my head against the bed, putting my hands against the back of my head in surrender. And before I knew it he was tasering me, yelling at me to stop moving. I remember feeling my entire body seize up. And then, in what seemed like one of those incidents of police brutality that you only read about in the news, he tased me again and again, right in the center of my back. I eventually found myself on the ground, body facing down, but my head looking up at a reflection of the scene in a floor to ceiling mirror. I remember looking at the face of what was supposed to be me in the mirror, but it wasn't; it looked like someone else, some scruffy dirtied-up guy who was being tased like no tomorrow by some asshole sadist cop who thought it was funny to see a guy squirm around powerlessly on the ground. The victim, he didn't look anything like me, but I felt everything he felt. I felt the sharp shock on the muscles surrounding my vertebra om its sides, feeling all my muscles contract in tandem, not being able to get up. Feeling completely helpless. Completely powerless.
And that's when I woke up, with an eerie sensation in the back of my neck, the invisible shadows of my imagination poking at the skin on my back. What a completely fucked-up situation that was. I suppose I'm lucky that it was just a dream. If I had to tell you what I thought it all meant, I'd tell you that to some extent, it seems to reflect many of the themes I come across in day-to-day life. I suppose it's a reflection of all the things I thought about before I went to sleep, like a brief and brutal summary of the past year, told with different but parallel experiences, filled with all the same real-life ideas and themes. Feelings of time, energy, wasted, reluctance to take action, attempting to take action only to be delayed by some mysterious internal force, taking action late and despite the struggle or the effort, seeing little reaction and receiving little to no gratification, being worked into the ground and being disabled at your own peril at the hands of some external force, debilitation... But I guess somewhere in there, there's that one moment where you finally feel like you're getting what you want. But then something from the outside comes in an breaks it all up for you. No pleasure. No gain.
-nesqu!k
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