Dreams that are out of date

I wake. The sheets are perfectly white. The mattress is hard. The air conditioning is on and noisy – but the room is a comfortable temperature. Hot sunlight creeps through the closed blinds, as does sounds of construction.

I’m in Bangkok, again, my third time this year. I have an hour before day two of my meeting starts. I seemed to have one long set of dreams this morning, a cohesive story. First was the recurring theme of finding a piano. It’s what I used to do in university years, whether at my own university or at a friend’s. Find the music building or a student residence and see if there was a beautiful piano to play on. A well-kept quality upright would do – a Yamaha perhaps – but a baby grand. Or a real grand piano! And then of course, it would depend on the space. Would it be hidden in a music practice room: great for privacy though, as a non-music student, would I be caught using it? Or would it be in a public space – likely to have much better acoustics, the notes allowed to travel up and reach a high ceiling – but the gambit of disturbing whoever was in hearing distance, particularly if I wanted to sing.

In my dreams, I am often in schools or buildings, and the pianos are always in the basement, sometimes up against walls or surrounded by furniture, or off in hidden rooms. This dream, I was in my elementary school in Vancouver, and I was successful, I found a piano to play. I was to perform, and was practicing “Strength” which was generally going OK though the bridge was unfamiliar.

It was a going away party for the younger sister of a friend – someone friendly – it was someone similar to C, the young niece of D, who I met in London, and she was going abroad for a while – hence the choice of the song. Strength needed to experience living overseas.

However, a main part of the dream was getting the idea for a wonderful comic song about accepting a gay brother. It was funny and feisty, a classic piece of musical theatre, with a set-up and then surprise, witty lyrics, and music which wasn’t clever enough to detract from the main story. It was heart-warming and a little rebellious and as first envisioned was a masterpiece. Somehow in the attempts to get away and write that song (having scribbled parts of lyrics on paper), I realized how out of date it was. Whether in England or Canada, the strides we’ve made in gay rights – including marriage or almost-marriage, and all the grand part of the population that I would socialize with – would find prejudice against someone, just because they’re gay, as old-fashioned and conservative.

How nice to wake up and find out not that my dream was unreachable, but that it was terribly out-of-date.

In the meantime, it’s been a million years since I’ve written on this blog. I’ve been away for 31 days of travel (North America and Europe, both personal and business), and was back only 4 days before coming to this current trip. Organising the travel beforehand was also busy. Life seems to be too busy these days to record, though not having the means to do so – i.e. easy computer access, is also an issue. Yet my writing career progresses nicely. I received the current catalogue for Signature Press which profiles my upcoming book of poetry, Bowling Pin Fire. That put a skip in my step the evening I received it, after a flat, hard day of work. I’m excited about being invited to be guest editor for Corpus, a literary magazine coming out of AIDS Project Los Angeles. I’m worried about finding the time to do it – though I know I will. The travel schedule until the end of the year is going to be intense.

Final thoughts that should really go in my journal blog but haven’t I always been too personal, too open? My back is slowly healing, though this time it’s taking a while. Today would be day 7. I’m still leaning over to the left, and it hurts to sit down in the same position too long. The oil massage helped somewhat last night, and the hotel bed is helping I think, but it’s hard and tiring when the body goes awry.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sleeping between 8 and 10 hours of sleep since coming back from the long trip. My body obviously needs it. And I still have a slight cough. Could be exacerbated by Bangkok’s pollution, but I am very tired of this cold/cough/sore throat that has been with me since my first week of travelling (probably since 25 June). Not drinking alcohol or coffee for a week may be helping…Enough complaining! Time to meditate, eat and get down to the meeting, hoping that my laptop will work today, despite its intermittent power problems yesterday.

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