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Vivid dreams
Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 9:54 AM by Dave Winer.
  • Something switched over for me recently, wish I knew what it was -- but I'm not spending as much time writing code. Instead I'm writing blog posts and hanging out, reading and doing a lot of sleeping. And because there's been so much sleep there's been a lot of dreams. And sometimes I remember little bits of dreams that at the time I thought were interesting or profound.
  • It seems significant when the narrator in my dream is my father. I wonder later if this is just my version of him inside me, or if there's some method of communication between the subconscious and the dead.
  • Sometimes it freaks me out that people in my dream see things about me that I don't myself see, in the dream. How could this be, I wonder -- because the other people are really me. It's as if my subconscious has written a play that my conscious self knows nothing about.
  • And lately my dreams have had a long-gone lover in them, and we're re-living the agonizing last days of our relationship. I woke this morning with a real, sad, and unhappy question. What if this was the love of your life, and you didn't know it then.
  • We say "no regrets" so casuallly, but is life anything but regrets?
  • And then I had a mathematical dream, wondering if time travel would be so entertaining to us if we hadn't invented awkward language for time that suggests that it could possibly be a two-direction thing.
  • Stories about time travel are fun, probably because we live with so much with regret. What if there were the possibility of going back and doing it again, knowing what you know now. When you're young you don't even know what that idea means. It's not like life imparts all that much wisdom, no -- it's what you know about yourself that matters. This was the big one Dave. We know that now. Be more loving, more caring -- spend the time to avoid misunderstanding. Don't give up so easy. Or give up easier. Try something else because what you did the first time around didn't work. If only. If only life were like programming, where you could do it three or four times, each time learning from what you did wrong and choosing not to do it again. Or if I could travel back in time and have a talk with those two young people and find out what's really in their hearts. Force them together in an embrace so they can talk love instead of hurt.
  • It doesn't get any less confusing. But as you go forward things are done, they're finished. Books are closed and life goes on -- until it doesn't.
  • I can still tell the stories about the people I miss, the loves of my life who are no more. The friends who are gone, the people who are just stories now, just actors in my dreams.
  • Apparently I have more important work right now that writing new code. :-)