The Dharma Bum

by Jaysen Buterin

Some souls are of the opinion that fidelity has lost its lustre in a generation of Xers whose basis for romance and fidelity is predicated upon Sisyphean-stacks of Aaron Spelling soap operas - while other spirits seek anesthetised solace in the supersuckersalvation of parental precedents and parables. If they've been lucky enough to have been graced with them, they have never spent a nights slumber where they didn't dream in colour, that they didn't live out loud - and if you can't shrug off the mind-forged manacles for a warm embrace of a dream, then you've spent this waking life in turnaround because as a brilliant heiress to a literary throne atop an orgy of intellectual intercourse once wrote about dreams, "My dreams were all of my own; I accounted for them to nobody; They were my refuge when annoyed - My dearest pleasure when free." It's Shelley boys and girls, copied with reverence and honour from the introduction to a tale of a modern Prometheus.

Do I dare disturb the universe and exude enough hubris to think that I could offer some pearl of wisdom on the subject of dreams? Not necessarily true believers (and yes, my special lady, I think that it should be spelled nessessary too). However since the men in the white coats have yet to show up to take me away, the meds must be doing their job and all I shall ask of you is a moment of your time, to entertain the enlightening, to ponder the possible, to think back to the way you felt after you first learned how to dream, because when you first learned how to dream, you didn't know the rules. This is not to say that even such a metaphysical mistress like dreams isn't governed by some sort of inchoative system of protocols, pops, and buzzes. Because you didn't know the rules, what was a dream - and therefore completely existent within the realm of possibility and plausibility - wasn't sharply segregated for you from what would become silly nonsense, and therefore didn't fit within the conveniently labeled and carefully defined existence that "they" think you should lead. Because when you don't know the rules, you can dream in colours, you can dream out loud, and there is no way in hell that any jackbooted fascist is going to convince you that you can't bring your dreams to fruition - that you can't make them happen for you in this world just as easily as you did in your mind.

Someone once whispered in my ear, "you better start dreamin' boy cause when you stop dreamin' it's time to die," and even though I really didn't need a drought and a bumblebee girl to tell me that, I wonder how many people, how many spirits out there, have disemboweled their dreams for a notch in the splintered headboard of a daily existence that they are completely indifferent to just because they don't see as they have any other choice or, tragically worse, they just don't care. At what age are dreams rendered nothing more than fleeting flights of fancy, to be paid no more attention to than the collective howl of every fibre of your being pleading with you in unison not to take a number for a rat race that the old you never would have ran? At what age does a person settle for just daring to dream, not at all living them out?

I don't know. Sometimes I wish that I did know but for the most part, I'm completely happy being an ignorant mammal blissfully unaware of the dreary denouement always lurking just around the corner. This is not to say that I don't have any answers but c'mon, can a crazy boy with blue hair who took the perfectly good body that his mother gave him and poked it full of holes and ink really lead you down a primrose path of discovery to an epiphanical moment of zen about dreams that the likes of Sigmund Freud, Aristotle, and Fleetwood Mac haven't been able to elucidate for you? You're damn right I can.

Before we become so cozily ensconced in the silly notion that everything in this material world that happens to, around, or because of all you material girls...and boys, has to have a perfectly reasonable explanation - before we become anesthetised by our own hubris that haggardly tries to rob us of the idea that there are perhaps more things in this world that we would ever allow ourselves to see or believe - before that last kiss goodnight, whisper to yourself (or into the ear of the person laying next to you who gets you hotter than Georgia asphalt) that all that you see or seem is but a dream within a dream. That they who dream by day are cognisant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. Then get that long kiss goodnight.

So yes dear readers, true believers, I believe that I shall indeed disturb the universe. Dream a little dream, it never hurt anybody, and even though it was the last genuine installment in the all too-brief collaborative cinematic efforts of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, it's one of the few pearls of wisdom that seems to make a timeless sort of sense. Sing with me, sing for the years, sing for the laughter, sing for the tears. I had a dream once in which I asked a beautiful princess, whose smile made the air in a room electric and whose grace and love I suffered a lifetime of trials and tribulations just to gain, to marry me. And in that dream, and in this world, she said yes. In that dream, I dreamt that she is my North, my South, my East, and my West. In this world, I dream that she's my working week and my Sunday rest. She is my every longing, my every desire, my every temptation - so much, that she makes it easy to abrogate the other temptations that lay in wait on my path, affording me the somewhat vainglorious luxury of striving to prove a particular renaissance man wrong when he wrote

to be continued....