I had a dream last night. No, this isn’t one of those blogs where I tell you I had a dream, but but then I reveal later that it wasn’t a dream in the sleeping-dream sense, that it was more of an awakening of thought while I still had my eyes open. It’s also not the sort of dream like I had this wish for myself for the future, but now it has fallen by the wayside, hence the past-tenseness of it all. Lastly, is not that I’m just pretending it was a sleeping dream, because it was really a real thought I had, but kind of a weird one, and so I’m sort of embarrassed about it, and so I’m just saying that it was a dream. Got it?

If not, well, here’s the basics: I fell asleep, and all these images ran through my head and there was some dialogue and a bit of storyline. Basically I got a short movie that I produced by and for myself for the price of closing my eyes and apparently being a little stressed out.

Two things are immediately significant about this whole affair. One, I don’t usually remember even having dreams. Two, if I do remember them, they’re usually like a photographic flash-type of thing, like this one: I was being chased by zombies. That was one of my more recent dreams – almost the whole thing in its entirety as I can recall it. If you want me to get wordy and descriptive, here’s what I remember: me and some unidentifiable other person (maybe, possibly, some other person) kind of running, and something was coming after us, and I knew it was a zombie, or zombies, but we couldn’t really see them, and I wasn’t going to turn around and look, you know? The end.

So, anyway, that’s what usually happens if I remember a dream I had. Last night? Not like that at all. Oh, and I should also mention, that when I do have dreams, they usually don’t have much bearing on reality – although there was that one time when I dreamt that a woman at the office was coming after me to kill me, which really was kind of close to the mark during that time in my life. Fortunately, she was eventually fired for taking pictures of sensitive documentation at work – but I digress! My dreams are usually vauge and/or pointless, brief, and I almost never remember them. Noted.

Last night, however, as I tried my best to attain some sort of uninterrupted REM the type of which truly restful nights are made of, a vision was visited upon me, and it was…well, it was…oh, it went like this:

In this dream I was trying my damnedest to get a residency in some new artist lofts that had just opened up in town. I desperately wanted to be a part of this. It felt like an immense moment of opportunity had arrived for me. This was the chance I’d been waiting for, the break that would enable me to lose myself in my creative work and really, truly, honestly, seriously make some big things happen.

My chances of getting accepted, however, were not looking good. The people who decide such things (I don’t know who they were, didn’t get that dream-info) were off somewhere considering my current work to see if I were worthy of being placed. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have that much completed work available. I’d known this was coming for quite some time, and I had been trying and trying to get some pieces finished for months now. Events had seemed to conspire against me, however, and one thing or another had cropped up and always prevented me from getting any real work done. The day job, the band, and a million other little things both expected and unexpected had continually thwarted my efforts to accomplish much.

I was at the point in my dream where I was aware of all of this, and I was sitting on the floor in some sort of makeshift studio or workroom, and I was looking at the few meager works that I had managed to complete plus a few projects that I had started – ones that showed real promise and would have secured my acceptance had I only been able to complete them! I sat there in utter frustration, knowing that I was unable to do anything, much as I might want to, that the time had passed, and all I could do was wait and pray I would be accepted, but that it didn’t look very likely. And as I sat there, knowing all of this, looking at my incomplete intentions on benches and the floor, I suddenly completely broke down and started sobbing, exhausted from anger and grief and stress.

Have you ever have one of those times when you’re physically and mentally worn out, like you’ve been working too many 12-hour days in a row, and yet, when you finally have an opportunity to sleep, you can’t? You just lay there and lay there and you’re absolutely dying to fall asleep, but you’re so wound up that your mind keeps going and it won’t shut down and you know that in another hour it won’t be eight hours, but seven, and then after that if you can’t sleep it’ll be six, and if you even get to bed by then it won’t do near as much good and you feel the night slipping away and you just know, you KNOW that tomorrow you’re going to wake up and be just as exhausted as you have been for the past two weeks, but you can’t do anything about it? It was like that. I was spent. Done. I was completely powerless to do anything, and I was feeling the opportunity just slip away.

I remember in the dream that I just kept saying “please” over and over again, while I was sobbing there on the floor, and I was saying that, because I JUST. WANTED. TO. BE. ABLE. TO. MAKE. SOMETHING! Something that mattered, something that made me feel good about what I could do and who I was, and it felt like somebody, like this big Hand of Life Itself was holding me back and preventing me from doing it.

I woke up at about that point, and I had a distinct feeling of relief for just a moment, a “Man, I’m glad I got that out of my system finally” sort of feeling – and then I realized I was just lying there in bed. None of it had happened. I fell back asleep almost immediately, and I don’t remember dreaming anything after that, but it came back to me when I woke up.

I don’t think that this exists as only a small connection to a conversation I had with my brother the other day. We were at the drag strip, and somehow he ended up asking how much sculpture I had done. I said, “Well, I’ve finished two, and I’m working on at third one, but I’m stuck. It’s been sitting there forever, and…I’m just stuck. I haven’t had time for anything lately. Just – no time at all. I haven’t written much of anything, and I haven’t done any sculpture work at all. It’s been two months or something like that.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a dream that was more transparent in my life. I think it’s time to stop waiting for some free time to reveal itself to me and time for me to start making some free time for some important work of my own. This reminds me yet again of the Artist’s Way in which it says that essentially creative people become unhappy, grouchy, cranky, and a little insane when we don’t get to create. I hope you allow yourself time for those some pursuits. It’s what keeps the creative self happy and, as a result, the rest of the self is happy as well.

Stay creative. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have schedule I need to rearrange. There’s free time to be cultivated.