Dreams

As it is the time of new beginnings, for contemplation, for the reevaluation of old and new goals, I thought I would take a look at life through a different lens, a different filter.

Comic Books

When I was a teenager, I was moderately obsessed with comic books. I was the right age for it to happen, because it was what some people call the Big Comic Boom. 4 X-Men titles, the death of good Spider-Man comics with the Clone Saga, the Death of Superman, Batman's Knightfall, the creation of Image Comics, Spawn, and the thousands of crossovers, and many many others.
I don't even want to think about the social ramifications, I may have suffered due to those comic book investments (cars, clothes, girls?). But that was then and this is now.

Last year, I reopened myself up to the idea of reading comic books,  but more specifically, graphic novels, collections of comic book series bound together in a single volume. And while you lose the monthly ebb and flow of reading in installments, graphic novels allow you to take in whole stories at a time and they're typically cheaper without waiting years to find out how a story ends. There have been a lot of great ones, especially, "Y the Last Man" and "Ultimate Spider-Man" (a modern retelling of the old stories). And from time to time, I'd also been picking up "The Sandman".

For many years, I'd been arguing the value of comic books as one of the last bastions for artwork and storytelling. And for something that started as the Funny Pages, that was saying a lot.  But if you looked at the drawings and the colors and the way pages were laid out with complex stories and lessons rivaling any other forms of artwork, it was hard to not see the value in them. When I read Michael Chabon's  "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and realized that there were others, people like me who weren't afraid to say how they felt about comics and hailed the pulp ambitions of those cartoons. (Of course he turned this one idea into a brilliant piece of literature.)

Yet as an adult, I never really felt like the comics I had read were exceptionally brilliant, in that way that special brilliance can change you after reading, seeing or listening to it. In dark times, comic books were my company, solace, and most importantly a place to escape. They were great stories, with great pictures and unnaturally curvy girls, but their tales were always pulpy, owing as much to great authors as they did to soap operas.

And then there was "The Sandman".

This comic book has lurked in the back of my mind since a teenager. I never bought it or read it, but the grotesque cover art that sat on the shelves of my local comic shop, was never far from my mind.

Upon recommendation, I borrowed a few volumes of the series from Hutson Hayward (www.thewickedgoodblog.net) and read slowly. The first volume was a classic horror book, filled with the occult, buckets of blood, a dark being on a quest for vengeance and a return to his proper place in the universe. Dark but fun, exciting, good words, interesting thoughts, laying the seeds for the books to come.  "The Sandman's" main character Morpheus is the embodiment of Dream, the Eternal King of Dreams. It is his kingdom that we enter through sleep,  the dreams, all creations from him and of him.

Months later I continued reading the rest of the series and saw the fantastic tapestry of this dark universe filled with dreams, creatures, and regular human beings as beautiful and flawed as you or I. And it is the pages where the Sandman interacts with regular joes, today and in years long past that affected me the most.

For "The Sandman" is not an escape, it is not even a place you like visiting, and you don't feel better after reading it. There are scraps of thoughts and images that linger in your mind, regardless of how long ago you closed the pages. Ideas that dig deeper into your mind then you'd wished. "The Sandman" is not a continuity book, where we follow one hero from adventure to adventure. "The Sandman" was whatever Neil Gaiman (writer, creator) wanted it to be. Sometimes the stories are about Morpheus and sometimes they are about how he affects people and sometimes they are about how people affect him. And many times they are solely about Dreams, where they come from, how they change and how they affect our lives.

It's in these stories, the ones about people and their dreams that stirred something in my soul and led me to this post. For when the time came to start thinking again, as this time of year encourages, I could not shake my dreams.

DREAM - Dictionary.com

–noun
1. a succession of images, thoughts, or emotions passing through the mind during sleep.
2. the sleeping state in which this occurs.
3. an object seen in a dream.
4. an involuntary vision occurring to a person when awake.
5. a vision voluntarily indulged in while awake; daydream; reverie.
6. an aspiration; goal; aim: A trip to Europe is his dream.
7. a wild or vain fancy.
8. something of an unreal beauty, charm, or excellence.

We dream in the darkness, so we can live in the light. ~ Willis McDougal

For many years, I used this quote, my own quote, as my signature for my hotmail emails. It was something that came to me when I was in an elevator leaving work at 8:00 AM, while on the night shifts. I liked the rambling nature of the line, the D and D and L and L, and I felt that if I could only get back to working during the days that I would become more whole and allowed to live like everyone else.

But break it down and I see that, basically, my world view had become so dark that all of my dreams were relegated to night time dreaming and I was just living during the day. It is that thought process that I've been running on for most of my adult life.

Which is in itself is a sad commentary on the growing up process. As children, I believe  we dreamed all the time, so much so that the line between what was real and what was imagination blurred; but life has a way of kicking it out of us.

You go around, stuck in traffic, thinking about how I can't follow my dreams because of LIFE. And you sit at work, because you have to pay bills, help your mom out, eat, have a roof over my head. But you make it through, because you compromise. It's like the Checks and Balances of living. Dream versus Life. You give up your Dreams for Life and you're a zombie, but if you give up your Life to Dreaming, you'll eventually become a weightless soul, eventually driven to madness or drugs, unless you get lucky. And what I've rationalized is that being healthy about this is staying in the middle, balanced.

In my life, I've managed to form certain compromises. I write, (DREAM) and I want to be paid and be read, (DREAM), but make no money for it (LIFE), and have to work too much at a job that I only occasionally like (LIFE), but it is in an industry that is just on the outskirts of helping me achieve this dream (COMPROMISE) and I have many great friends that I work with.

But does being healthy and being in balance, help you accomplish your dreams? Does it make you happy? Don't you need to be a little crazy to reach them?

One of things I do know about compromising is that we stop looking at things as DREAMS and we start looking at them as GOALS. It's easier to deal with reaching a Goal then it is to achieve your Dreams. They seem more tangible, more real, and so less beautiful then Dreams. And maybe your goals are a step by step way to reach your dreams, but take another look at the many definitions of dreams and you can see how people have had internal conflict in regards to the dreams.

In the back of our minds, for every want, every desire, every goal that we have, is there still a Dream. Is that Dream pure or has it been corrupted through compromise? Is there an old Dream that still haunts you despite your new dreams? If you don't reach for that Dream will it sour what you can touch?

All this from reading a stupid Comic book where the main character is just a visible representation of the definition of dream, taking the Jesus-as-human-body-embodiment-of-God-and-spirit idea and applying it to other universal human fundamentals, like desire, death, despair, time and dream, do I think of all these stupid things. But what great art can do is to make you look at yourself and reevaluate based on the insight of someone else's ideas.

And that's where I stand. Here in 2008, evaluating if I am still Dreaming or if I am all about the Goals, trying to figure out if I reaching toward the things I can physically touch or the unreal beauty that lurks ahead, the things that my soul longs for, the ones I dream about. If I am not dreaming, am I not moving towards something? Is it worth chasing ghosts of dreams and going on the adventure which very well may lead to failure or playing it safe? Listing off all my dreams to see what compromises were made, why they were made and where they are taking me.

Very early on in my twenties, I decided to stop thinking, because I chose to just survive, to just get through it, and do what I had to do. I think maybe its time to start thinking again, to feel again and maybe, just maybe, dream.