Dreams

I've been thinking a lot about dreams lately. Not the kind you have a night (although those have been odd these past few weeks), but the aspiration kind of dreams. A friend of mine is off living his dreams and it's invigorating and tiring all at the same time. He talks of his big plans and everything he is going to do in the future. His whole life is before him. It's invigorating because he radiates excitement and you want to go along for the ride. It's tiring because I'm so over the big dreams and the crazy ride of trying to achieve them. I did all that already.

I mean, I lived my dream. Yes, lived, past tense. My biggest dream was to work in a design firm. I have an economics degree and no fine arts background. How in the world was I going to be a graphic artist? And why did I want to be one? I don't know. I just did. I guess my need to be creative was stronger than my need to be logical. And I worked many, many low-paying jobs to get experience. I used what experience I did have and worked myself into places that would never hire an economics major as a production person. And now I work in a two-person design firm. It's my dream job. I actually thought the job I had before this one was my dream job until it blew up in my face! But for 5 years it was my dream job and now this job is. I can't imagine working anywhere else.

But have I gotten too complacent? I mean should I have a new dream or can I be totally happy living the old dream? Thanks to my over-stimulating friend, I feel like I should have a new dream. I thought about just living vicariously through him. Heck, he dreams enough for an army of people. But that's not enough or right even. I should have my own dream. I've been independent my whole life, no point changing that part of me now and riding on the dream coattails of another.

So one day my horoscope (don't get on me about that, I read them, I don't live by them) said "Write down your dreams, they are about to come true." OK, I thought, not a bad exercise. So I wrote down the craziest of impossible dreams and I put them under my pillow. I don't expect a single one of them to come true because these were my wildest dreams — dreams I don't even admit that I have to myself. So if you think you are going to read about them here, you are wrong. You'd have to have access to under my pillow to know these dreams.

But I will tell you about some of my more pragmatic dreams. I'm thinking about taking off work for a month and traveling somewhere. Maybe living by a beach. Malibu looks pretty cool to me. I've never been there. But what would I do with the cats? See, dreams at my age come with restrictions and limitations. But I guess we really only limit ourselves. I'll have to keep that in my head and see if I want to make it a reality. I also dream of taking a photograph of somebody famous, but then I think since I don't value fame in and of itself, that is a little bit shallow of me. Really I just want to take inspirational photographs of whoever steps in front of my camera. I want to make art with my photographs. That is a good dream. Perhaps I should try to get in some local galleries or shows. I'll have to fine-tune that dream a bit. To be honest, I want to see where my photography will take me, not where I will take it. So maybe in time a dream will reveal itself to me.

On one of my photography sites, I try to write out a little dream every day. But now, I'll have to dream bigger and see what my future holds for me.