Semi-Lucid Dreaming
Started: Monday, August 19, 2002 07:41
Finished: Monday, August 19, 2002 08:39
Evolving and shaping...
I was in that old church. The church my parents used to take me to as a child. It was empty. The sanctuary was mostly dark, but little strands of tinted light came filtering in through the stained glass windows. (I didn't even think about trying to adjust the light levels; but somehow I knew this experience might not be physically real right now.)
I walked up and down the pews, my eyes constantly open to what might appear next. Then, I saw it: Treasure.
Now, it was certainly a dream.
Piles and piles of it. All wonderful. All beautiful. But I couldn't take to much. In fact, I would have to settle for just one piece, maybe two.
I knew the consequences of becoming greedy.
If I tried to grab as much as I could possibly handle, I would never survive. I would weigh myself down into the grave with the weight of my own appetite. If I were to become overburdened with such riches, I would certainly be crushed while trying to get out, perhaps even being killed by the traps I myself had set earlier while I was in a paranoid rage."
"Just take a tiny bite of this precious treasure. Just one. Maybe two, if you can handle it. Or three, if they will fit in your pockets. Your choice. Your risk." But SO much to choose from! How could I pick out just one, or two, or three? There are at least five that I absolutely must not go without.
But I must choose.
After waking up, I didn't need a New Age mysticism expert to decipher the meaning of this one.
You got stuck in the moment
And now you can't out of it
Don't say that later will be better
Now you're stuck in the moment
And you can't get out of it
...
You are such a fool
To worry like you do
I know it's tough
And you can never get enough
of what you don't really need, now
My oh my!
Like a fantasy fable, my life during the past month has been an ongoing series of such decisions, and the choices continue into the present and future.
All the things of value are placed in front of me, and I must choose which ones are most important. There are far more of life's riches available than I can possibly consume.
There are many desirable things to do during the coming months. Things I have said I will do, if at all possible: Find a home to buy, get more involved in representitive politics, evolve my web page code to make more use of integrated multimedia, help setup rage2, see "her" again, get the B5 and LOTR DVD sets coming out a little later, play the next wave of GameCube franchise titles that are being released every couple months, and.... somewhere in there, find employment so I can somehow keep myself financially solvent, and with a roof over my head while I do all of this.
I also realize why I lost the job I had. In my eagerness to see corporate corruption uncovered, I attempted to create alliances with former coworkers to discover the truth. This, in itself, was not the misstep. A little risky, perhaps. Everything is risky when dealing with such treacherous forces, but it was not catastrophic.
The mistake came when my eagerness to see unfairness avenged became great enough that I let a little anger seep out. I made a prediction, which would later be interpreted as a threat:
"The pigs at the top will pay."
Those were my words. There were uttered in anger, as I tried to grasp how a corporation could be so utterly without a soul. To string people along for years, as they design, build, and improve a product, putting time, energy and life into it. Then, when it is finally nearing perfection, throw away the primary architects! (Because the company "can't afford it", even as a constant stream of new marketing and sales faces appear to hail in the new era of riches!)
Yes, I expected that eventually, the "pigs" at the top would pay, somehow or another. And I wanted to help make it happen, if I could. Not through foolish violence, as some might have thought. But through the unveiling of the leadership's own corrupt practices.
Well.... I got what I thought I wanted. We uncovered corruption. We found deceit. We found out that the address where I sent those words was a big decoy, setup to fool everyone into thinking that they were talking to a former coworker, when in fact, the person at the other end was.... [fill in the blank].
It was a self-fulfilling prophesy. But not without other consequences. I now have no job. I'm going to have to scramble to find something, and it will likely pay far less than my former position.
I still want to do all the other things I talked about, but it is going to be a huge stretch to make it happen. In all likelihood, some of my goals are going to need to be postponed, because one person can only handle so much.
I'm going to have to decide which parts of life are most important, and which ones are not quite important enough to focus on right now. If I take on too much, I'll sink. I'll sink either through over-extending my time and physical energy, or through financial debt in the future. (Yuck. Don't want to go there. No way.)
Choices to make, things to do, people to see. Time to prepare for my day.