dreams

Perennial Optimist

In the last couple of days I’ve felt a little more optimistic. It’s funny how one small dream can quickly lead to another. Making those dreams happen is the difficult part, but optimism certainly helps.

I’ve struggled to find things to be optimistic about just lately. My football team is an eternal disappointment; everyday life is a muddle and a struggle; and I wasn’t able to retrieve my iTunes downloads. However, all that changed today. Someone at iTunes let me download all my old purchases. Well, that is except for More Than A Feeling by Boston, sadly (and strangely). But I do have The Final Countdown by Europe back. I only buy cheese in download form, and I only download cheese! I must buy Lordi’s Hard Rock Hallelujah at some point…

Music makes it better again, somehow.

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Blur

Where do the days go? You meet me in a confused state of mind at the moment. I am on tablets to prevent migraines, yet they further manifest on my being by imposing an extra hour on my day. This drug makes me ever-tired and ever-hungry. I have been able to, as in most of my life thus far, been able to control my appetite but I have struggled with, as I have for the past fifteen years or so, sleeping.

It has left me rather disoriented, forgetful and dazed. Things that happened in the morning feel like they had happened in a previous epoch yet other past events seem to repeat themselves in a strange déjà vu. And my dreams haunt me. They prey on my mind day and night, as I live them and relive them in cycles. The same people crop up, and there isn’t much I can do about it. It is somehow worse that I can only remember fragments of my nightmares, as they seem to develop but conclude as the nasty things I do recall. Yet I don’t think it’s my medication that’s the cause, however they may be a catalyst.

In this time I have redesigned two of my websites… somehow. I have also ditched much of www.stephenbroughton.net, which was my personal CV (really, absolutely no-one cares right now) and changed it into something that might be a little more “commercial”. We’ll see how it goes.

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Away With The Fairies

My dreams have been quite taunting and also rather alarming in recent days. I’ve had just about every crush I’ve had pay a visit. Last night, I came under enemy fire and seemed to suffer from some kind of exponentially increasing collateral damage falling in on top of me.

But what does it all mean?! The latter is one of those dreams I have occasionally; culminating in my own death, perhaps indicative of some pending danger. The former set of dreams perhaps signify my inability to forget and move on generally. Or perhaps they mean nothing.

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Mathematical Witterings

It has been a pretty bad week to be honest. It feels like it has just been a succession of kicks in the teeth. It started last Friday with my exam results.

I got a 52 and a 66 for the two modules I sat exams for in January. I wasn’t too happy about the 66 in Modern Bayesian Inference, but that wasn’t so much of a disaster. The 52 however I was quite annoyed with. No-one felt confident leaving the exam room, and after having asked a couple of people the results they achieved, I thought it might have been worthwhile talking it over with my personal tutor. However, since he was inaccessible for much of the early part of this week, I didn’t. That perhaps was no bad thing, since having spoken to others it seems it was just my performance in the exam that was to blame for the poor mark.

As a note, it isn’t just exam performance that earns you a good mark for a module. It also depends on the performance of the rest of the class. The intended result is that if an exam is "too hard" or "too easy" the marks are adjusted to suit. However, this lends itself in turn to create a competitive environment in the leading weeks to the exam. For the most part, they are your friends and colleagues (and arguably victims), but come the exam period they are the nemesis, for their performance has a bearing on your results.

That was just the first knock to my confidence. I had been waiting for results from GCHQ to arrive this week, and yesterday I received the dreaded email informing me that I had been unsuccessful in achieving an interview. That was a real shame, because that was my dream job. I would be playing about with computers and codes, doing some analysis and using some maths in my job. Furthermore, work stays at work: due to the sensitive and secretive nature of the work, I couldn’t take things home and I couldn’t discuss it. That would have been ideal.

When I told Mum she immediately came and hugged me. It wasn’t really what I wanted to be honest — I didn’t really want a reminder that I should be disappointed. But she could clearly see how important it was for me. It’s left me a bit stumped to be honest. I had really pinned my hopes on it and hadn’t considered any other career direction, so I am at a loss. I also feel I have no real direction now and feel a little disillusioned.

And they say they come in threes. And they do. I also found out today that I have not been accepted onto the Great North Run. That was a substantial knock too. This additional setback means I am not going to achieve any of my goals this year. It’s only February.

I don’t even know what it is now I need. A direction would help; a goal even better. But right now I feel that everything I have been working for was in vain. Bugger.

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Dreams

A few nights ago, I was speaking to a friend of mine who outlined his ambitions for the future: become financially self-sufficient by the age of 30. I admire him for that, though I have my doubts. Perhaps it isn’t fair to doubt him: he is clearly able to command a lot of money with his skill and knowledge; but to be that financially sound is quite an undertaking to say the least.

But after finishing my homework a few nights ago at about 1.15am, with my brain still buzzing from topology and functional analysis, I thought about all the dreams I’ve had… and I set about listing them:

prime minister, guitarist, drummer, frontman, bassist, keyboardist, doctor of medicine, comic, cartoonist, lyricist, poet, internet millionaire, software engineer, child prodigy, rally driver, motorcyclist, bus driver, lorry driver, pilot, landscape gardener, footballer.

The thing in common with all these, is that it didn’t take much to persuade myself that they were just dreams, and not my destiny. The problem is that I have a lot of ideas, but not the ambition to realise them.

Once upon a time, this was a different story. My dreams were few and close by: I would strive towards them, and made some headway to making my dreams come true. I think the problem is that though I would have been able to achieve some of my goals, I hadn’t ever really been encouraged to reach them, and in some cases I’d been actively discouraged.

People don’t expect anything from me, it seems. People are confident in that I am able to do a given job well, but don’t feel compelled to encourage me to broaden my horizons.

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More Dreams

Had another disturbing dream last night. It was the first time I had ever seen a dead person, and someone quite close to me was the ‘victim’. It was pretty horrific, as you would imagine. I dreamt last week that someone else close to me was dead. It makes for quite some relief in the morning, but I worry whether I have foreseen something terrible or that it was a stark warning that in the event this event should occur, I am extremely unprepared.

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Dreams, Dreams, Dreams

I’ve been having some weird ones lately. Two of note were particularly odd. In the first, some people whom I do not recognise appeared to fancy me, which is rare in itself. In the second, the university appears to have hated me more than I could have imagined, setting some of my exams at the University of Kent at Canterbury, inducing a 700 mile round-trip for those exams. It was even more far-fetched for me to wake up and remember that it wasn’t the exams on my mind, but rather it was someone I was looking for. Even more oddly, there were old crushes in this dream, popping up inexplicably. I wonder what it all means. Perhaps I have been working too hard!

Unfortunately it seems reality is far more mundane. It appears this will be a very uneventful summer.

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Locks Shocks

I had a nightmare last night. I dreamt I had long hair and I liked it.

It felt so real…

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Another Scary Dream

Sometimes I wonder whether I get dreams to challenge me, or to prepare myself for something that could happen. Last night I dreamt that I was dying.

From what I can remember from my dream, I was in a hospital bed being told that I had a tear in my heart, and my only prospect for survival was by having a heart transplant. And this provoked a lot of thought, even in a dream!

I have always felt a little uneasy with regard to organ transplantation. I’m not against it, but I felt that it wasn’t something I would comfortable in doing. I’m not sure whether it is just a personal, spiritual thing, that I don’t want my body tampered with after death or that I don’t want someone else’s organs in mine. But when you are given the prospect of dying, and it seems real, the matter becomes a choice of either life or death.

In the end, in my dream I went for the transplant. It shows how putting yourself in the situation can make you think differently about it.

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The World Is Not Enough

I hope that it is possible to lead a life hoping and wishing for something to happen. I suppose it is like hoping that when you die you might go to Heaven, or some form of afterlife anyway. I am living in the constant fantasy that one day my dreams will come true. It is quite possible – and in fact rather likely – that they will not. The fact that people dream that they will win the Lottery shows that this is not as weird as it might appear on first inspection.

They are simple dreams, but nonetheless private ones. These dreams would not seem as special and sacred to me if I broadcast them, so I won’t here. But at the end of the day, I want what most people want. Happiness in short. If we are happy, what more do we need?

This reminds me of how my mood is characterised. I suppose it is one of these things that you realise about yourself as you mature. My mood is determined by the mood of those around me. I can’t be unhappy or angry when I’m with happy people. Likewise, I find it hard to be optimistic when I am in a negative environment. I believe that empathy runs deeper in my brain than what could be considered normal for a human.

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