The Ranch Dream

Last night I had a dream geared around the possibility of riding horse, and I felt the need to share it with the internet.  

Tim & I were on a ranch, on vacation. Other people were there - his friends. 

We are always around his friends in life, never my own - simply because I don’t have any, which breaks my heart to write, but the few friends I have left in this world live 3000 miles away. I simply do not see them, or interact with them non-digitally, enough enough for me to commit their faces to memory in order for them to be able to show up effectively dreams. If only I could see them in my sleep, I'd at least get to see them at least in some way and perhaps my time awake might feel so much less empty. 
 Being annoying is a bad habit, and, let me tell you from first hand experience, it is hard to break. The less I speak to real people, the more the bad habit grows. Real conversations put me in check and I recognize that I need them. Often enough, the only people I talk to outside the home are coworkers who find me utterly and completely annoying. It makes speaking at all difficult to even imagine, except to Tim. At least I have him in my life to speak to daily and he helps me hold onto reality. 

Dreams are an exception to this. Well, no, they aren’t; but in sleep I have allies. And they support me exactly the way I never even knew I always wished someone would support me in life.

In my dream, we were on a ranch-like resort with Tim’s friends. 

There were horses and it made me long for the summer days spent on a family ranch in Wisconsin, horseback riding Western Style, which is the best style, in my opinion, for safety reasons and also because it’s a classic example of an American improvement on a lacking design - why wouldn’t you have a handle, however small, attached to the saddle to hold onto if something goes wrong with your mount? It’s practical and intelligent, yet Westerners are the barbarians? Please. 

Anyway, I wanted to go horseback riding and I spoke about it any time the mention of making plans came up. I mean, what were we doing on a “ranch” resort if we weren’t going to ride a freaking horse? But people kept coming up with excuses and delaying the activity. One of his friends has a habit of speaking condescendingly to me, especially when he's drunk. It’s not personal, he does it to most women I’ve noticed - all the women whom he has already ruled out the possibility of sleeping with. It’s a pathetic display of his ability to dominate for no reason other than his own sad fears and he stayed pretty true to character in my dream.

 In life, I hardly tolerate this behavior, and look beyond it with the acknowledgement that I, the friendless wonder, am also far from perfect. I can see that talking down to women comes from a deeply bedded insecurity pushing him to feel as though he needs to constantly prove to everyone, including himself, whatever it is he lacks confidence over. I know I probably just made him sound like an asshole, but please note that there are so many aspects of his personality which are wonderful; that is just the one part of him I don't care for. Though, when faced with him placing his expectations onto me as a way to boost his ego in my dream, I fought back as probably would have in real life.

I forget what activity he was pushing for, that’s how interesting it was to me. Probably standing around a bar watching other people square dance. Nope, that sounds like a fun night-time activity. This was during the day so I don’t know what he wanted. Maybe there was a pool and he was more interested in showing off his new girlfriend. I met her once; she was an all around delightful person and if I were dating her, I'd want to show her off, too. I honestly like her and I have no real life prejudice to bring into this dream against her, so I have no clue why my subconscious made her the VP of Team Boss You Around. She was helping to lobby people into doing whatever crap thing the two of them wanted to do and, true to an his ego, Tim’s friend was annoyed that everyone didn’t find his boring ass activity interesting; which meant, he was took a considerably condescending tone with me for insisting on going horseback riding.

In my dream, as I would in reality, I told him to go do what he wanted, that I was going riding and I'd meet up with them all later. 

In real life, Tim would say nothing, afraid of rocking the group's boat too much. I have no such fears; if you’re afraid of a little boat rocking, don’t drop it in the water where I’m swimming, but Tim isn’t like that. He’d likely make sure I’m OK without him, and still join the other party, just because he knows I’m independent enough where I don’t care if anyone joins me or if his friend freaks out a little bit when he doesn’t get his way. He'd pick the option where someone freaks out less because he's just sensitive like that. I'm not sensitive. I don't care who freaks out; I want to do what I want to do and likely it's not actually hurting anyone.

But, in my dream... it was so beautiful. Tim took my hand and we walked away. I told him that I was concerned we should break up because his family doesn’t really like me (his sister is the only one who does, but she’s moving away) and his friends all don’t like me at all. I’m a square peg in the circular cookie cutter of his environment. He didn't scold me for being dramatic, lecture me on the importance of being nice and passive, or suggest any social behavior that always ends with me feeling repressed. He just smiled, kissed my hand and said not to be silly. He made a crack about the other couple eating too much cake, which in my dream, somehow translated to being a little nutty. We giggled and made our way to the horses to try on cowboy and cowgirl boots, which were apparently required. I picked out colorful ones and Tim picked out plain ones, then we had fun teasing each other for our choices. As we were waiting for the mounts to be brought up, other people from the group showed up, also interested in joining us. Only, they couldn’t because there was a line and a waiting list. They could go together and meet us at the end of the trail.

Shortly after that, the bossy friend showed up with his Frau, having decided to join everyone else. Strangely, though, he was talking as if it was his idea all along and acted annoyed at Tim & me, not for winning some kind of popularity game that existed only in his head which we weren’t even trying to play, but instead for some other cranky excuse that he’d made up in an effort to make us either look or feel like bad friends, which had no effect on us."Thanks for going ahead of us and not putting our names on the list, too," or something along those lines.

Our horses arrived, we took our mounts, and raced to the beginning of the trail, laughing at our own inside joke about some people eating too much cake.The dream went on from there, but I don't remember it at all. I just remember the feeling of fulfillment and having someone truly by my side. 

I love how ridiculous dreams are, how what is a minor part of a person's in-real-life-personality becomes such a dominating part of a dream's plot. The brain has the capacity to manipulate scenarios that have so little link to reality, but touch on such real topics. The dream points out how alone I am, how good it feels when Tim stands by me - when it happens. It forces me to acknowledge that I'm not "nice" and that I never will be and how badly I just want to be accepted for that; how proud I might feel if only I could inspire someone else to act more socially independent. That our independence is what makes the forces trying to control us in life, no matter what their methods, weaken to the point where they are laughable. And love; most of all, this dream stressed the importance of love and interdependence; that you don't need each other as some sort of emotional crutch, but that you choose each other and work as a team from there. How we all must long for that in every relationship we have. 
Also, isn't it interesting how, when I can't think of anything I want to write about, how totally uninspired I am, my subconscious can spit out something amusing and technically correct in terms of story telling: a beginning, a middle, and an ending, with a problem (albeit a tiny one in this case, though sometimes the smallest problem feels like a giant dilemma) and a solution. Now, if only I could dream something a little more action-packed...

Brain Garden aka My brain is a cofeehouse of internal dialogue.

I had a paranoid thought regarding a friend. It’s easy when you feel isolated from people, whether the isolation is caused by physical or emotional distance, to replay small things they said casually in conversations, take them out of context, and dissect them. This cannot be healthy, though it does appear to be a common condition I find myself in.

Before I explain about the conversation with B, I should explain as to why I have a hard time remembering conversations verbatim, settling mostly for the gist of what went down. The thing is, I constantly have a few conversations going on in an ever-going internal dialogue on top of whatever it is I’m talking about with those around me. One conversation processes everything I’m seeing. But then, I ask myself questions like, “Do I like the green hat because it brings out the butterscotch highlights in that girl’s hair or is this a color that is on the rise in popularity that I should probably incorporate into a top or some sort of accent, like binding?” 

While I’m studying the girl in the green hat, I’ll simultaneously be writing. I have had a list of characters filed away in my head to reference when I get to actually writing. Nevermind that I haven’t “actually written” anything in years. The list remains and continues to grow. At that moment, I was adding a character with chronic Asian hair envy to the list. This girl would notice something beautiful about asian girls everywhere she went; inspired by an earlier thought that only asian girls can bleach their hair and have butterscotch highlights and not have hair accents the color and texture of hay. Mediterranean gene FAIL.Although, that would be a challenge to translate into sci-fi.

While all that is going on, I’m also maneuvering how I can turn a conversation a certain way so I can casually bring up something I’m absolutely dying to talk about. It’s important to me to hear all about other people first before I dive into what feels like my MEmeMEme spiel. I don’t like to lose what’s important in life in the mix. There should be balance.

Oh, and on top of all that, I can sit on a bench with B, enjoying a hot, fruity tea beverage in the middle of a bustling Queens neighborhood, talking about politics. I do not think I can be the only person on Earth who consistently has multiple conversations articulating in my head. Also, those are not the subjects my mind is limited to while conversing; there are many, many issues on my mind at any given time. There is no back burner. There’s a massive garden and every person, place, or issue, big or seemingly small, has a flower pot containing it and that my brain feels compelled to feed. Nothing ever dies in my brain garden. As cluttered as that may seem, I’ve always preferred a baroque-esque garden with layers upon overgrown layers. 

However, those were just merely a few issues on my mind, the eternal coffeehouse in my head, me chattering away with myself and other versions of me, and sometimes actual physical people in the real world, like B when she called me a Republican even though I voted for Obama.

Why would I dissect that? I’ve admitted to being Republican in the past. Just lately, it feels like an insult; it no longer feels like part of me, or even relative. It’s another version of me, tucked away in the garden behind the thorny raspberry bush called Ex-Boyfriends. I forget about those plants sometimes. Why should it bother me if others don’t?

Why is this bothering me four months later?