Dreams lost

[vaneramos]

bitterlawngnome building on Thursday.

~~~~~~~~~~

These past nights at Danny and Bill's I have been waking up in the middle of the night with dreams in my head. I want to crawl out of bed and write them down, but am always too lazy. In the morning nothing is left but a memory of having dreamt.

One left a few scraps. A war was going on. I was fleeing with a woman and her child. They seem to have been ghostsandrobots and Jude, and the more I think, the more likely it seems I was supposed to be writer00. This happens to me in dreams: seeing the world through another's eyes.

So we were fleeing from Nazis or something. Our course followed the banks of a long, frozen river in winter. Sometimes we travelled by boat, sometimes on land, sometimes on the ice. Our clothing was 1930s. At different stages we would stop and the story would take up with someone else or another group of people fleeing. I regret not waking myself enough to write down the details of these compound lives.

The temporary disappearance of LJ struck me in a strange way. I wondered how helpless I would have felt if the loss had been permanent. I have seen the collapse of an internet community once before: Themestream. lisalemonjello, tafkak and stephe will remember that one, too. That time we had 24 hours' notice, just long enough to scramble around, collecting the email addresses of friends we had come to cherish.

But when it disappeared, my life was not the same for a long time. It happened at a worse time. I had no friends as close as the ones I have now. That community of writers filled a vital place in my life. When it evaporated, I had to find new ways to fill my need for community. I hardly knew any artists or writers.

If LiveJournal vanished today, I would be better off. Because I was here in Toronto, rather than at home, I barely noticed the interruption. I had friends around me and social activities to occupy me.

Still, it feels like I have invested too much in one thing. I am deeply dependent. I have had my life uprooted too many times and I'm afraid to trust something as new and unstable as an internet community. It makes me wonder how fragile and vulnerable our society will become as cyberspace bores its roots deeper and deeper into our social fabric. The internet is at once difficult to control and a powerful tool for manipulation. We must never stop thinking objectively about how it influences our lives.

Yesterday afternoon in Toronto, near Bloor and Delaware.