Creativity

I've ruined my sleep schedule after working on my final reports for this semester. At least this shows me just how vulnerable our bodies are when we don't care for ourselves with proper discipline. Certainly my shortcomings in college have two causes. First, I refuse to live out my life only having gained the limited scope of an technical profession without any awareness of the significance engineering can play in humanity, so I take far more courses than I am capable of handling (I was already classified a senior by the end of my third semester at NCSU). However second, and more importantly, is my inability to maintain a disciplined sleep schedule. This lack of discipline means missed appointments, low mental acuity, even eventually leading to poor physical and social health. Because I've had at least two roommates who contributed to this situation, and realizing now that living alone in Japan has been the best remedy for me, I don't plan on returning to Alexander Hall in the fall.

What makes this particular instance so depressing is the vividness and length of the dream I just awoke from. I was enrolled in some sort of class in Japan (I think I believed it was a metropolis city like Tokyo in my dream) in which our assignment was to compose a J-Pop song. My dream spanned the full course of writing the song, growing friendships with others in the class and witnessing their struggles with writing their own pieces, and eventually giving feedback on each other's pieces at our final performance which doubled as a sort of ceremony for placing our final published piece in a sort of final project shrine. As I started to wake up I realized I missed one of my classmate's performances and I was scolded for not having paid attention. Now that I had been kicked back into dream mode it started to feel like a turn towards one of those came-to-class-naked dreams (I've never had one before), so I quickly shifted gears to a flying dream. I hadn't had a flying dream since I was maybe 12 so this was great. However the experience was completely different. In the flying dreams from my childhood, I remember just wanting either to escape some situation or merely to force my will into the dream, so I would fly to nowhere in particular and everything below looked the same -- one giant residential block. This time was quite different. I have never imagined such a vivid landscape as that which I saw in this dream. The most beautiful metropolis setting imaginable, I went between diverse building zones where all kinds of people and architecture could be found. I had everything from bridges and skyscrapers covered in ivy to children's sandboxes. Of course in the last few moments before I woke up the city started making less sense, like people driving on bridges to dead ends, or giant swingsets 40 stories high. But until that point, all the places I had seen, all the songs I had composed just for the sake of this dream, everything had made me envy the power within our own minds that is restricted when we're awake. If only it weren't for this, I think I would take my music composition book with me in all my travels.