Dream Journal Exercise

           

I’ve always been pretty good at recalling my own dreams. I still remember many dreams, good and bad, from my childhood. While doing this exercise of recording what I dreamt after waking up I realized that I tend to dream a lot about real life situations that are relevant to my everyday life. Most of the time everything in the dream is normal, except for one detail that is specific for each dream. I remember in old dreams how I would see lost objects from my childhood like the GameBoy that hurricane George took when I was a little kid. Granted, it was my sister’s GameBoy, but it still made me cry.

            I remembered that the other day I dreamt that my grandfather was still alive and just casually hanging out with us at my house. Even though it was sad to realize it was just a dream when I woke up, I still felt happy because it felt so real that it became like another memory I will always have of him. I guess, in one way or another, most of my dreams are wish fulfillment dreams, except those where I end up half naked in a public place for no apparent reason. Those dreams are the worst next to the ones where I’m just falling without any plot. It’s as if my dreams are directed by Michael Bay and where written by a 3 year old who loves throwing things without any provocation.

            The more I try to interpret the meaning of these dreams, the more confused I feel. What am I supposed to learn from this seemingly disconnected hodgepodge of dreams? I’ve noticed that I rarely have these falling dreams anymore. Most of the time I’m dreaming about some situation that is happening in my life at the moment, be it something stressful or something good that I want to relive. I guess I need to continue doing this dream journal exercise and maybe I’ll learn a thing or two about my inner subconscious.

Jamaica Kincaid In Depth

            The Antiguan-American writer, Jamaica Kincaid, in her novel “A Small Place” paints a picture of her own personality indirectly. She describes two sides of a story: the tourist and the native. Through these two opposites, she displays her own voice and lets us, the reader, come to a deeper understanding of her own psyche. Being a native Antiguan, Kincaid has a biased view and it shows in her writing. Not withstanding, she does criticize the natives in many ways, but there is a latent scorn towards the tourist in the sense that she feels as though they only serve the purpose of reminding the natives of their own harsh reality and their even worse past.

            She expresses a deeply rooted resentment towards the English because of what they did to the Antiguans throughout history. At one point in her book, she makes a short remark about her own personality: “So do you see the queer thing about people like me? Sometimes we hold your retribution.” Thus, she expresses how there is a fire inside of her that burns indefinitely with the disapproval of all those related to Antigua’s dark past. It may sound like Kincaid is unjust in her treatment of tourists and that she may very well be stooping to the same level of generalized hatred as those who mistreated the Antiguans in the past, but there is much more to it than that. She isn’t any ordinary Antiguan that read about the past and decided to hold a grudge. No, she was a child born in that so-called past.  The things she describes in her book, she experienced them first hand as a child.

            In the end, are people who suffer not entitled to feel resentment towards those who caused said suffering? Is it healthy or productive? Not necessarily. Morality and reality seldom go hand in hand. It is difficult to judge such a person’s thoughts when one has not lived through any of the things that person describes. In her own words: “But nothing can erase my rage-not an apology, not a large sum of money, not the death of the criminal.”

The Ugly Tourist and The Jealous Native

            In a small place, Jamaica Kincaid presents two contrasting images: the tourist and the native. She describes the tourist as a hideous human being that has grown tired and weary of their ordinary lives, which brought them to visit such a place as Antigua in order to escape their mundane lives. These travelers, she suggests, should not think about the reality of a regular Antiguan life nor should the thought of the oppression the Antiguan has suffered cross their minds and ruin their precious vacation. It is in seeing their different and simpler way of living which attracts the tourist to Antigua because it provides an escape from their seemingly perfect lives in a seemingly perfect place: it takes stepping down to appreciate what is up.  Thus, when the weary traveler returns home, the first thing they do is rest. 

            On the other hand, the author paints a contrasting image of the native Antiguan experience and how it relates to the tourist’s. You see, it may seem at first that the native has a profound hatred for the tourist that lies within their own historical knowledge of oppression and general mistreatment, but that is not the truth; at least not entirely. Most Antiguans, through Jamaica’s eyes, lack the economic prowess needed to travel outside of their homeland. As she writes in A Small Place: ““when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.” This means that they themselves cannot be tourists. If a person cannot do as he or she wishes and dreams, is it not natural for them to resent those who can?  Is it morally correct? There is no simple answer to these questions.  One might argue that the tourist faults in his or her view of the native people, but one just as well may claim that the native blunders in his or her preconceptions and envy. If there is one thing, one error that lies at the core of this dilemma, it’s generalizing based on one’s own preconceptions.

Cultural Identity

            How do I identify myself? Maybe the question is more complicated than the answer itself.  What is identity in and out of itself? Maybe it’s all about the environment in which one grows up and how we take part in it. It makes sense when evaluated because there is so many different types of people within any one culture in this Earth. However, they also share many things in common.  Thus, identity seemingly exists as two different, yet similar entities: individual and social identity. I find it truly beautiful how life is governed by the existence of opposites: light and dark, good and evil, hot and cold, etc. It gives life a sort of symmetry and order in a seemingly chaotic world.      

            Much like the dichotomy of identities, my life has always been composed of two distinct cultures: puerto rican and bolivian. Two apparently different cultures fused when my parents met all those years ago.  So the question has always been: How do I identify myself? Am I a puerto rican, or am I a bolivian? It seems like a silly question since they are not mutually exclusive, but the question remains. In reality, the answer has always been simple because I have lived my whole life in Puerto Rico and have always been surrounded by that side of my family.  Needless to say, I have not forsaken the other half of my identity simply for that reason.  In fact, my identity lies in my name itself since my first name comes from my grandfather from my father’s side (bolivian side) and my middle name from my other grandfather.

I have loved my full name ever since I can remember because it always reminds me of two of the most important people to ever take part in my life and whom I have admired for so long.  I’ve always thought that my parents gave me this name so I would strive to become a great human being like my grandparents and to be reminded that no matter where I am, I will always carry with me the spirit of two cultures and two families so if anyone ever asks the same question I can simply answer: “both”.  

Dead Poets Society

            Carpe Diem. Seize the day; suck the marrow out of the bone of life.  What is life without passion? Asks Mr. Keaton to his students.  Indeed, most, if not all, of the students at the school go through the motions following a path set by their parents without any say or consideration.  This sets Todd and Neil’s internal journeys in motion from the get go.  Two roommates, both with their own problems end up being each other’s pillars as their lives start over.

On one side, Todd is a young man who suffers from finding his own voice in what Walt Whitman calls the play of life.  He suffers from being painfully shy and this keeps him from accepting help from the people who care about him. Only when he is pushed to his limits does he find it in himself to become the person he has locked up inside for too long.  Mr. Keaton describes Todd indirectly, but perfectly when he quotes Thoreau by saying: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation”.  Afraid of the world might think of him, Todd defies his own wishes and desires in order to conform to this third person view he has of himself: a frightened turtle, hiding in his shell; an ostrich sticking its head in the dirt.  At first, he refuses to join his classmates in their Dead Poets Society meeting because he is afraid of the outside world in every sense.  This is how his external journey begins: Neil gives him no excuse to not go.  In a sense, his external journey is not about travelling, but becoming vulnerable to the world and accepting the reality that life is unpredictable and sometimes the greatest risks are the ones that pay off the most. 

Next to Todd, Neil starts off as a complete opposite: an outgoing, expressive and charismatic young man. As opposed to Todd, Neil already knows what his inner voice is, but struggles to let it out.  His greatest obstacle is his father who decided that Neil must become a doctor and emphasizes how he cannot let them down and that his desires for acting are only but a whim on the grand scheme of things. Like his friend Todd, he finds liberation in Mr. Keaton’s teaching about finding passion in life and sticking to it.  He took this advice to heart and decided to join a play without talking about it with his father. He chose to ignore his problems, his external journey, and chose to enjoy the bliss of ignorance.  Like Maya Angelou wrote so beautifully: “The caged bird sings of freedom”.  The only problem being that this caged bird tasted freedom, but a false one. After experiencing life out of a cage, there was no going back and that is why he took his own life once his father locked him in once again. In his death, he brought out the voice in his own classmates, especially Todd.