Why the Next Few Posts Will Make No Damn Sense

My whole life, I have been plagued by dreams. Not really dreams, but semiconscious and semi lucid scenarios. In the dreams, I'm running from other people. I don't mean running on foot through a crowded mall, but packing up and running off to the mountains or the deserts because the entire force of civilization decides that I am no longer a worthy inhabitant. Often, I have to drag various people, the vast majority women, off with me. Often the dreamscapes are recognizable topography, though sensationalized by whatever mind games I'm running on myself. The mountains will be spired and vertical, the deserts will be scratched open aeolian sandstones and infested with snakes and poisonous lizards.

Even the dreams that are so benign as to escape my memory the next day leave me bruised and scraped from some battle I had to fight that manifested itself in thrashing or waking up with starts. I have been told that I often talk in my sleep. Always directing some nameless group or arguing some passionate point.

There are only two constants in these dreams. One is that they involve, in detail, a vehicle that actually exists in my real life. The other is that I always have to lead, an activity much like The Holy Cross Trail in that it terrifies me until I get my ass out there and do it.

I bring this up because over the next week or so, I'm going to write down the dreams I can remember before they go away forever. With someone there, laying out next to me, I never have those dreams. Someday, I might not have the luxury of these dreams. A warm body next to me takes away all those crazy missions and chases. That is why they are mine and mine alone. As much as I enjoy every sacred, dreamless night I have spent with a good woman, somewhere inside me, I know it won't last. It brings to mind the celibacy vows of Gandhi. He never wanted the love of an individual to override the love of all men that gave him his mission and life's work. Not that I'm pretentious enough to compare myself to Gandhi.

When I see life spreading around the canvas of events, I wonder if I can ever have anyone here without losing my sense of priority, my sense of responsibility to the bulk of humanity. My dreams may be taken away for a while.