I'm going to talk about dreams.

I am returning to school in an hour, and a very large, loud part of me would rather not. It's four degrees there. Four. Degrees. There is almost nothing to look forward to in my classes: my favorite classes are being taught by very nasty people; my favorite professors are teaching courses which titles make me cry (and crying, in four degrees, is a mistake). I have to start math again. Some of my favorite schoolmates are leaving for their semester abroad, and a whole crop of new people are returning, and who wants to uproot relationships and start plant new ones when the ground is frozen solid and you've just settled in. It's very much safe to say that while I belong no where else but here, this school is not what I dreamed it was for five years (five out of seventeen? Almost a third. A whole third of my life, devoted to this place.)

And with that said, I'm going to stop talking about school and start talking about dreams.

Dreams are silly things. I once dreamed my English teacher bounced across Australia on a giant inflatable strawberry, not even making that up. A lot of times, on American Idol and Oscar award speeches, people talk about living their dreams, and that's silly too. You don't live dreams. You live life. Dreams exist entirely independent of reality; the dreams we sleep through have absolutely no bearing on reality, and the same is true for those dreams people talk about in interviews right before they thank their personal Lord and Savior, which happens right before I vomit. Dreams are good for one thing, and one thing only: having something to refer to when things seem not worth it, and having something to slip into when the day has been long and difficult (the use of separate clauses might make that look like two different things, but I promise you, they're the same).

Dreams don't light Broadway stages and they don't feed families of four. If you find yourself living your dream, you have done something very wrong. If your dream is attainable, you severely lack imagination. I don't say this out of bitterness, I say it entirely out of hope. Imagine if I pulled up to school in September and it was everything I dreamt it to be. Imagine if it was at all what I dreamt it to be. Dreams are horizons; when we reach them, it's time to plug off our noses and jump off the end of the earth. When we live our dreams, there is nothing left. There is no personal satisfaction and there are no personal saviors; but dreams are very real, and so are Gospels. Simply because I am not living my dream I get the full satisfaction of being alive; right now it's in a dissatisfying frozen wasteland, but hell, so was The Call of the Wild.

This all coming from a woman who hasn't slept in nights, so take with a grain of sand.