Working Towards The Dream

Have you ever woken up only to feel as though you’re still in a dream?  It’s a strange feeling – everything around you is moving in that “sleep-awake slow-motion” state and there’s not really a beginning, middle or end.  Instead, you feel like you’re just watching yourself go through the motions of your life, never really quite seeing and feeling what it is you’re actually doing.  You’re just there.  You’re doing it, but you aren’t doing it.  It sounds a little out there, but I know that at least a few of you know what I’m talking about.

Illustration by Adrian Steeves

It’s the daily grind of life.  It can be an incredibly rewarding experience that hardly feels like work at all, but for most of us who are just trying to “make it”, it’s a soul-crusher.  It’s a reminder that the everyday life you’re experiencing in that dream-like state – a state that people should only be in when they’re completely and utterly happy – is not what “living” is supposed to be.  For a lot of people, that “dream reality” is a far cry from their “dream life”.

Karl Marx once wrote that work is the sacrifice that you make in order to be able to live, and as such your work and your life are two completely separate things.  Not bad for someone who was writing in the 19th century; in fact, I believe that he was on to something.  What you do for a living and who you are as a person are mutually exclusive concepts.  The only impact that your job has on your life is the monetary fuel that it provides you with, enabling you to do other things – things that make you human.  To use Marx’s terminology (my profs would be so proud), your “labour-power” is simply the most practical (and in most cases, legal) thing that you can offer someone else in exchange for money.  That money is, in turn, put towards things that constitute whatever life you choose to lead: you can use it to purchase certain foods, watch movies, go out to clubs, galleries or Star Trek conventions or just spend it on your friends – whatever makes you feel like you’re alive and truly happy, and who doesn’t feel most human when they’re alive and happy?

Illustration by Adrian Steeves

Sadly, people seem to get really caught up in their work, but not always for the right reasons.  There is that tiny group that claims to be living their dreams, doing things for a living that they say they would do even if they weren’t getting paid for it.  Then there’s the rest of us, who only have a j-o-b so that they can pay the rent and put food on the table.  I fall very neatly into that category.Twice, actually.  I’m in school, working away full-time on a Master’s degree, but I also have a quasi-full-time job that makes me want to poke out my eye every time I think about it.

Neither activity is even remotely close to what I’d rather be doing with my time.  In fact, it seems that both are the culprits that have stolen the last remnants of any life  I thought I may have had.  The worst thing is, I’m doing the Master’s so I can get another job, but I have to keep working at my current job because, well, they pay me a tidy sum of money to exert small bursts of effort every now and then.  Each day, I feel my dreams slipping away from me, ever so slowly, but surely.  It’s almost as though I’ve stepped outside of myself and just the shell of me has taken over my “life” because none of what I am doing actually feeds my soul.  It’s even gotten to the point where I can’t remember what papers I wrote last semester, and I just do the bare minimum that is required of me for work.  How bad is that?

But I don’t want to watch my life pass me by, and this is not a pity party.

My dream is to travel and eat my way around the world, experiencing the sights, smells and sounds of the places around me (bonus if someone actually wants to pay me to do it).  I want to spend weeks living with the people – not just a day or two – doing what they do and really feel the places around me.  It’s a big dream that will take months, if not years to fulfill, but I’ll get there some day, even if I have to do the tour in little, itty bitty pieces.  In fact, doing in this way might make me appreciate things that much more, but I might be getting ahead of myself with the optimism.  Honestly, life right now is torture.  But I am at least somewhat satisfied knowing that whatever I am doing right now is creating the future “life” that I’ve always wanted – the dream life that I’d love to lead.  Like Marx said, I’m sacrificing today so that tomorrow I can live .

Illustration by Adrian Steeves

Like so many of my friends, I’m banking on this hope that my job will take me where I want to go, and I’m not talking about  opening up future career prospects.  The way I see it, my job is my plane ticket, my hotels and hostels, my fantastic meal in some exotic place.  My job is not who I am, but the potential of what I can become if I can truly be allowed to live my dream life. 
It’s a means to an end; what is important is the final destination, not the journey, though if you can make it through the journey, you’re that much stronger a person and that final destination will be that much sweeter.  Oddly enough, in my case, my final destination is the beginning of a wonderful, global adventure, but there you have it.

It may sound cheesy, but I am going to get there someday.  And just like me, you’ll get there too.  Just sacrifice a little more and one day you’ll be living your dream life, not your life in a dream.

© 2008 Chrissy Sudjana, Illustrations by Adrian Steeves; licensee (Cult)ure Magazine.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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