dream on

I met a guy on the bus the other day who is following his dreams. He started paying attention to them when he found himself driving down the freeway and woke up; he realized he had been sleepwalking and actually got up and started down the road in a dream, and in reality, too. When he woke up one night from a nightmare about pulling his wife out of a flaming car wreck and saw he was pulling his wife out of their bed, he woke up to the need for help. He has gone to all the famous sleep therapy centers, including the ones here in California such as Stanford, but what has really started to show some promise is a California therapy straight out of the fruits and nuts category: ambient light acupuncture and meditation, delivered by a Chinese-American New age therapist in his Mission Valley office. My sleepwalking bus buddy is an Aisan-Fusion chef from Sun Valley so he is no stranger to cultural mixes or to continual reevaluation of his paradigms. The experience with his dreams becoming some sort of dysfunctional reality has cause him to reevaluate his path in life, too. He's thinking about selling his house, buying an RV and heading south before he gets too old to enjoy it. We were talking about our life paths, and he said "you seem like you're following your dream--at least you aren't cooking anymore," and I had to agree. I have given up the pan for the pen, the kitchen for the classroom, and I'm doing it before I get to old to enjoy it.

Henri Rousseau, "The Dream" (1910)

I am followint some sort of dream, and he is getting set to follow his, just as soon as he gets that dreamwaliking thing under some sort of control. What this little interchange that happened as we rode to the nether regions of North Park has shown me is that we all follow our dreams whether we want to or not, and if we ignore the unstoppable route laid out by our prescient minds, it doesn't matter; our minds will take us there anyway. Might as well go with the flow, or in this case, stay on the bus for the full ride.