Visions of an Oneironaut: ‘Go forth and be scrappy’

This was borrowed from a dream exploration image search.

Dreams are so telling, yet as circumstantial as the snapshots our minds glom onto when we rouse from them. Earlier this week I dreamt that I had been slipped LSD in a beverage. I got to see my world go Technicolor and I felt like I could pick apart the essence of the world around me. In yesterday’s adventure, I was in coven of business students tucked away in a secret library in a prestigious university’s basement. Before class, I’d studied the background of my professor and found a pattern correlating his pay increases as a professor to jobs switches he’d made after teaching for a bit of time. 

(He’d teach for a while then get a corporate job. Teach somewhere else for higher pay and then work somewhere else for higher pay, and then get an even higher paying teaching job after that.) I realized after I woke up, that he was gaming the market to earn faster pay bumps.

How is this relevant? Hold on…I promise.

In my dream of being in this class, most of the other students in class were asking the professor for his connections to life in the fast-line, but I wasn’t. The instructor asked me why I was there. Another student chimed in, “he’s an environmentalist and wants to…” So I cut her off and said, “That’s right. I am. I want the environmental movement to have the scale and intensity of the best of anything.” He looked at me quizzically, and I clarified jokingly. “I probably shouldn’t have told you that I’m an environmentalist, because now you won’t take me seriously. Just pretend I didn’t tell you. In order to be effective at this it’s best if no one knows.”

So anyhow, what I realized about this dream was that, one, yes it’s entirely true. In order to change the world you have to keep it hidden. No one wants the gravity, the mess, the comparative analysis to how they’re actively living their lives. This is why the professor was actively switching from instructing to working in the corporate world. He’d loved the prestige of teaching, but couldn’t get access to teaching at elite institutions or make the wage he desired without climbing the ladder through corporate “experience.” (He had to work in the corporate world to build the currency to teach in the elite world.)

So, for those of you that buckled your seatbelts and hung on for the ride. Here’s my point and the point of the dream. If you really want to do something – you have to think about all of the avenues to get there. This professor of mine in my dream, could have stayed at his first college, doing what he loved, teaching. But he never would have professed to the student group he’d hope to reach, nor earned the wage he was fit for earning. He had to game the system to get there. The same is true for the environmental movement. Though I love efficiency, wind turbines and solar panels, geothermal installations, bikes, and public transportation, the rate at which these items are creating an infrastructure is not fast enough to counteract our current construct. Population, deadweight loss of our global society (inmates, refugees, etc) and our brand of employment are the real items to adjust. 

Anyhow, I know this is a long post and not necessarily in the style that I take traditionally, but I wanted to treat you loyal blog readers with that message from the dream world. Alas, go forth and dream big, but be scrappy. If you want to invent a new spaceship you may have to grow bamboo and sell furniture. After a decade you may have sold enough furniture to buy the necessary materials for your spaceship.