Dreaming perfection
Early in the evening yesterday, I was tired. I hadn’t really had a good weekend of sleeping in, my sleep deficit was high. So, a little before 5pm, I went upstairs and went to sleep. 4 hours later, I woke up. Mykala got home, we chatted and ate, and I went back to bed to sleep for 7 more hours. When I sleep that long, I end up with a lot of REM sleep in the morning. Conversely, when I was quite sleep deprived during my first few years of school, I recalled my dreams exceedingly rarely.
So, yeah, dreams. I’m nearing the end of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, and I finished another chapter of it before going to sleep. Unsurprisingly, it provided the raw material for my morning dreams. What was surprising, though, was the quality: I dreamt some of the most cinematic, beautiful, affecting dreams I ever have.
With soundtracks.
The picture comes into focus: late afternoon sunlight streams in across a garden by the sea, silhouetting the balding head of a titan, struck down by cancer, little time left. This klaxon warning of the approaching end has only recently pushed him to acknowledge his family, yet his limitless commitment to his career never flags.
Really, this is just a slightly romanticized version of facts from the book. But shortly after, my dream shook free the facts and vaulted into imagination. The camera sprang free from executing simply a dolly-bound tracking shot — first, it looked as though it was on a jib, then became almost a virtual camera. The shot vaulted over the man’s silhouette, using him as a three dimensional pivot. The destination for the camera movement was, at first, the garden. The construction, execution, condition of the entire garden was not almost perfect or evocative of perfection, no, it was perfect in the way that you can only see in dreams, imagine in your mind. Every petal laced with dew, lit by the sun, every leaf alive and positioned exactly where it should be.
Some kind of impossibly haunting, bittersweet melody only possible in dreams increased in volume, and I was made to understand that this man, though not dedicated to his family, threw his every waking moment into perfecting these things that I saw. That garden, that walkway, that home. Down the each and every tiniest detail. Platonic ideals, each one.
He may not have been able to, as the platitude goes “take it with him,” but these things would continue in his absence.
Then, I woke up.