Currently listening to the song "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, their only song from the famous "Rumors" album to reach the U.S. Billboard No. 1. Talk about an embattled band full of infighting and love but also divorces with Lindsey Buckingham, John McVie and Christine McVie, all each having a falling out, but also a ton of good music. I'm more partial to the explosive "Edge of Seventeen" by just Stevie Nicks myself, but Fleetwood Mac is definitely a culturally significant band, and it passes the "MJ hum test," which is if I start humming a tune and MJ knows it from my humming, (or vice versa where MJ hums and I identify), it's a song worth knowing about. It also is discussed at length in the TV series "High Fidelity" with Zoe Kravitz, a film that made me jealous of record store owners.
I used to dread waking up when I was young because it meant I'd have to start the day getting up in cold Chicago, go to the bus stop and wait to go to school, or finish some homework I hadn't finished the previous night, or later in life, get up to go to a job that I was slogging through, and it shouldn't really shouldn't be like that, we should all get up with a sense of purpose in life, with some excitement, not just get up to do something we dread. Recently, though, I've diagnosed "wake-up lethargy" (refusing to wake up in the morning) as a symptom of a different problem: I don't want my dream to end. I hypothesize that at least for me, dreams are so enjoyable and life-like that I don't want to leave them, and want to return to the world that I had left behind in the dream. ESPECIALLY after not sleeping well the previous night, I get some of the most lucid, long-lasting, and enjoyable dreams. It's not as dramatic or visually aesthetic as the Christopher Nolan movie "Inception," but who knows, maybe dreams are a link to another dimension somewhere, maybe past lives, parallel lives (good movie that I discussed previously), future lives, other people's lives, imaginary lives, transient lives, etc. Whatever it is, I can almost feel like I'm in a dream while I'm in a dream, and yet I continue walking the path, or flying the skies, or shooting the basketball, whatever I'm doing in my dream, knowing that I probably won't come back to this world again when I wake up...but that's OK, I don't feel loss, I dont' feel strong emotions, it's just a nirvana-like state of being, like I'm floating just watching a movie without thinking about anything else. Rarely do I hae any similar type of experience in real life: I try to finish all the tough tasks I have and just wind down in the evenings, but those times are few and far between, with some bad after-dinner gas mixed in, worries about tomorrow, desperately trying to multi-task, cooking dinner and washing dishes, all kinds of distractions. Dreams are so much better, like nothing matters, I feel no anxiety, no pain, no worries, exactly what I'm searching for in life but paradoxically never get because I'm always trying to do 3 times at once in a hurry to get everything done. In many ways I imagine dreams are the best version of what death can be, just a state of being going on in my head, no worrying about what happened in the past or fretting about the future, just letting everything be. And the best part is, I can wake up after a dream and everything is OK. Maybe that's what death will be like, with Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" playing the whole time?
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