Angst

Of Dreams and Snowflakes

xkcd: Every Damn Morning

Dreams are certainly odd things. My mother believes they can foretell the future, and indeed when I was young, I was certain she was magic, because things would happen, and she would say she had seen them in a dream. Later I wondered more about cause and effect, and I learned from my own experience that dreams aren't the only odd thing, memories can be strange as well. They warp, they change over time. Things remembered often become more real, more rational. Other memories drift away in the dust on the edge of our road.

It could well be that dreams are nothing more than nighttime sensations which our mind interprets as memories. They have no form until the brain shapes them into something which we can recognize. We've all felt some pieces of a dream fade as we seek to remember, while others, even if they seem less important, become more concrete just because they are more like real life.

It's Been a Year

A year ago I told my wife that trying to get our relationship back to normal by taking small steps just wasn't working. We had to dive in fully committed and act like we were a happily married couple, instead of trying the "if you do this, then that will make me happier and maybe I'll do that" approach that had failed so often in the past. She agreed to try it, and we had a pleasant evening together. The next few days were nice, but soon we were back to business as usual. Several weeks later, with no progress made, she said she just couldn't do it, and I said I'd run out of ideas. After almost twenty years of trying to make things work, I simply couldn't think of anything else we could do to get back what we had before we got married. I'd spent the first years of our marriage being oblivious to what was wrong, and the rest surviving on the hope that we could fix things. Without the hope, I couldn't go on.