Lately Dreaming

“Everything I sought in life I abandoned for the sake of the search. I’m like one who absentmindedly looks for he doesn’t know what, having forgotten it in his dreaming as the search got under way.”

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I woke in tears from a dream recently. It was uncharacteristic of the dreams that I typically have, and it didn’t take long to realize that it had something to do with my goals in this, my search for meaning.

I found myself engaged in a scavenger hunt of sorts, with clues left all over an area that I suppose was meant to be significant to me, but I didn’t recognize it. Perhaps it was more important that I realize that I was in competition with another guy on this search (this understanding, I can remember, took my attention away from the details of the landscape). The game (or whatever) was designed for me, I quickly became convinced, because each of the clues were literary: they (the proctors) used several novels that I’m very familiar with, some random lines of text or poetry, and some obscure history facts. The competition, I somehow understood somehow innately, was not a literary man.

This whole game had been orchestrated by some (we might call them) friends; these guys are from my past, though I will see them from time to time at gatherings put together by mutual friends, and they are the few people in my life who are just older than I am (meaning they represent that transitional period between me and adulthood). I am the eldest of my siblings. I have one older cousin, but he’s always lived far away. These guys established, even if I didn’t follow in their example, how success should be pursued within our community, and what that success should ultimately look like (for they become, by virtue of their station, the tastemakers).

On this hunt for clues, I had been ahead of my competitor for some time, but he eventually caught up (with help from the taskmasters, who, I suspected, wanted to see him win if only to see me lose). I had been in the middle of unraveling some over-complicated clue, tangled as it was in a mess of ribbon that was meant to lead its untangler to the next discovery, when I realized his trick. You see, he hadn’t been reading the clues—he wasn’t even remotely familiar with the novels or their themes—he had done a simple internet search for the answer to the whole game. It was even more distressing when he explained to me that our quizmasters, the tastemakers of our community, had done the same thing: that this whole exercise was the equivalent of a dating site survey. That thought, realizing that I was competing solely for their approval, which was no more than an arbitrary adoption of some cursory standards found among the first results of a query that was meant to appear somehow more significant because they enjoyed the authority of age, destroyed me.

Once I discovered their plot to deceive me, I grew angry and violent, and I lashed out at my competitor. You see, he believed me to be an idiot for not having had the thought to “google it" myself. He explained to me that taking that kind of initiative is what made a man successful these days. At that moment, I was terrified that he was right. The potential implications of such a thing being true shattered my perceptions of all the things I had been struggling to accomplish these last four years. I felt this caving in-sensation, falling into myself and melting away because, if he was right, this whole search to find meaning in my life was going to have no tangible value in my community, because, there, no one else cares, really, who they are; they care only that they are and that they are like everyone else.

I lashed out and pummeled him into the dirt. I brushed the dirt over him, barely covering his features, all the while hoping I hadn’t killed him. As I ran away toward a nearby building, my arms full of the clues I’d picked up, I had fully expected someone to grab me by my shoulder and spin me around to face the wrong I had just done, but no one noticed. No one noticed, either, that I still clung to the idea that I could solve the problem of the game in spite of my knowledge that this was all designed to be a big joke—I just knew there was something there for me to discover, and I couldn’t let it go. I had just eliminated my only competitor, the fan-favorite. I was the only one still playing, still searching, still obsessed, still believing that something in these clues was going to lead me to some understanding about myself that was going to set me free of all of my demons. I hid away in the dark, and with a flashlight I had pilfered from a car parked near the shallow grave of my competition, I laid the clues out on the floor around me in the order I discovered them, and the light began to fade as the battery began to die.