Slaying the Dreamer

 

 

 

Sigmund Freud said that there were three components to the shaved ape. The Id, Ego, and Super Ego. You are born with the Id. It’s what you are. Where you live, and honestly, where you will die!  The Ego gives you the idea that there’s something better out there and the Super Ego makes you stupid enough to try to find it!

Now the preachers tell us that we are comprised of The Flesh, The Spirit, and the soul. We are born in The Flesh, just like Freud said. The Spirit makes you go to the bar, and The Soul is what you lose when you check into the motel with the sixteen-year-old girl that you picked up there. Freud or Billy Graham, it is the same.

There are two universes. The real one; the earth, moon, and all the stars, and the one you burn in your crazy mind. Now, any thinking person should be happy with an unlimited reality, but that’s where dreams come in. When a person isn’t satisfied with what he’s got he invariably imagines what he wants. Id plus Ego equals SuperEgo. Once a person follows dreams he must explain why. It’s called justification. Yeah Saul, why did you leave that cushy job in the Temple, change your name to Paul and go get your head chopped off? Some people!  I’m not crazy, just lookee here! This is where you get Bibles, Qu’rans, and Books of Mormon from.

But there’s another book that is quite popular, the Karma Sutra, or positions for the liberated mind. I would not suggest trying any of them after fifty. But, that dream can turn your life around or turn it upside down. Always remember that one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, be it spinning that wheel in Vegas, or remarrying an ex-wife, it is the same.

Chasing dreams can be fulfilling or forbidding. Graduating from college and dreaming of a successful career is a reasonable dream, or it was in the sixties anyway. Now days you’d be better off using those four years developing a better meth, but who am I? Casinos count on this mental dream machine. Some guy rakes it in during one spin of the roulette wheel. That’s reality. Thinking it’s gonna happen to you next? That’s dreaming.

When you allow your Ego to supersede your Id you will try to do Super Ego stuff. Like quit your steady job and take off to Nashville to become a superstar. Yeah, that’s a good one. Everybody back home told you that you were a brilliant songwriter, and you believed it, not realizing that waitress who served you at Shoney’s down on Demonbreun has  probably written better songs than you ever will. But you will follow that dream and no golden words will ever roll off of your tongue.

Realizing the illusion, and grasping reality is hard. It really will make you or break you. If you don’t shoot yourself, which is a classy way to go, you will go dragging home to face all the ridicule and laughter. Did you gain any wisdom? No, but hopefully you gathered smarts. Will anybody listen to you? No. Their listening to that song in their head just like you did. They just don’t have the guts to go and chase it. So, what was it all about?

 Everybody dreams. You aren’t any different than anybody else. A few pursue the dream. Most fail. There’s one chief and a lotta Indians. Aho!  Were you wrong? Look, barring disease, car wrecks, or pissed off husbands you got around seventy-five years on this third rock from the sun. You can live those years, or you can live them. You can put your light beneath a basket and live a fairly normal uneventful life, and if that’s what you want more power to you. I can’t do it. Or you can try to grab that ring. It is the same. 

In the end we all end up sitting on some porch somewhere, and it don’t matter if you are looking at a beautiful lake in Nashville or a privacy fence in Austin, wherever you’re at, there you are, and the grandkids will still think you’re a creepy old man. But, if you learned anything you will stare at that lake, or that fence and realize that it’s been there all the time. You could have seen it had you only looked. Always check that chick’s ID at the bar!