Tag: dreams

The Dream is Always the Same

Random Thoughts

Mitch: You know, um, something strange happened to me this morning…
Chris Knight: Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?
Mitch: No…
Chris Knight: Why am I the only one who has that dream?

TheDreamI have a recurring dream. Well, I have two recurring dreams. The other one is more of a theme than a single dream, and it is about zombies. But the one I want to ramble about today is the non-zombie recurring dream.

Lots of people dream about flying. I imagine, however, that most people fly like Superman or some other super hero when they fly in their dreams. When I dream of flying, it’s more like Andrew Clements from My Secret Identity.

Really it stems from high school literature class. We were allowed to pick our own books for our book reports, any book. I chose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And within that tome was the following line:

The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

This is how is goes in my dream. I am needing to go somewhere, the store or work or something, and I step outside the house, throw myself at the ground and miss. I slowly float through the sky, swimming instead of soaring. I tilt in the wind and drift. But the key element of the dream isn’t actually the flying. This method of movement through the air requires me to will myself to move, and that force of will exhausts me, both in the dream and out.

Some dreams, like the aforementioned zombie dreams, leave me feeling refreshed. I wake up ready to attack the day. But after a flying dream I am sluggish, physically and mentally. I feel slow, exhausted. I am to the point now that when I begin having the dream, the moment I throw myself at the ground and miss, I start trying to employ the tricks I have honed over the years to control my dreams.

I watched Dreamscape too many times as a kid, but it has come in handy, since it works. Never to escape the flying dream though. Any other dream, I can will it to turn into a zombie apocalypse or move to a beach, or both, but the flying dream remains and I wake up tired.

This probably means something, but I’ve had too many flying dreams lately and my brain thinkering isn’t what it should be. Perhaps if I can just get a few nights of zombies…

Anyway…

You have to play to win!

Random Thoughts

Mega MillionsThe motto of the Lottery is simple: You have to play to win.

It is flawless in its logic, because you can’t win if you do not have a ticket. I have a ticket. I have several, in fact. The wife and I have a few, and I chipped in $5 to the office pool. I mean, it’s (as of this writing) a $640,000,000 jackpot. As a former math junkie – Okay, fine, not really former, I just hide it better these days – I know that the odd of willing are hilariously small. 1 in 175,711,536 to be exact. However, the entertainment value really can’t be beat.

See, for the low price of a single dollar, you can daydream about how you would spend your winnings (a $462 million payout if you take the lump sum, and you should, because winnings are non-transferable, so if you take the annuity and then die, your family gets nothing). You can share your dreams with other people and plan out how you are going to get the life you want – the life you deserve – if you manage to be holding on to the winning pick. Just in the last three days (including today), that single dollar (okay, $10) has given me at least a dozen hours of joy. Day dreams and fantasies, all with just the remotest of chances of becoming real.

By comparison, it costs $10 or more to see a movie and be entertained for a couple of hours, maybe more if your friends also see the movie and you talk about it, but really, how many movies are worth spending lots of time talking about it? Usually it’s just 2 hours and done.

“Couldn’t you daydream without spending the dollar though?” It’s the question lots of people pose when they object to the Lottery. “It’s a tax on stupid people and poor people.” they might say, or some other way to degrade the people who buy a ticket. And they are right. You can daydream without buying a ticket. Daydreams are free. But the one thing you can’t do without a ticket: win. If you don’t spend the dollar, your daydreams are just daydreams and nothing more, but for the cost of just $1 those daydreams become potential plans.

What are my dreams? What would I do if I won? Well, a lot. I mean, even if the government took half in taxes you’re still talking about $231 million. All at once. If you put it in the bank at just 1% interest, you’d earn $2.3 million a year. That’s a lot of money. But I have tickets, so I have plans. I have lots of plans…