Living your dream

Here’s something interesting: if we were able to decode dreams and play them in a movie-like format, would you be interested to watch them?

Let’s say you go tonight to bed, you wake up tomorrow and I give you this technology to be able to see what you dreamed last night. Would you be curious? I am sure most will, as I will as well. But what if the recording of your dream lasts a few hours time? Would you watch it all? Then would you continue with the recordings and watch them every day after you wake up, like you watch a tv series now? Because if so, you may end up dreaming your dreams, or living your dream. Get it?

If you watch what you dreamed, for many hours a day, every day, is like taking what you have in your head and putting it back again in a constant loop with tiny variations. I find this a huge waste of time.

But wait a second…I think that’s pretty much what most people do today.

They go to places and take photos or record videos of that place and they barely enjoy it. They share that moment with others and end up looking at photos more than at reality. You look where I went on my FB profile, I look at yours, we both look at photos. I know people that see all places in photo quality, to put it this way. Because they look for how awesome a photo with a sunset will look like, but they don’t enjoy the event. Look at your Facebook or Instagram, or other people’s profiles, and you will pretty much have an idea of what I am talking about :). If you spend your life taking photos and videos, and then watch them later on, it’s not only similar to watching your own dreams, but even spending time recording them. And you forget to live….

 

More to that. How many watch movies, reality shows or tv series? A lot! You can look at stats and you will find that billions of creatures watch them daily. But isn’t that like watching other people’s dreams?

Think about this….is it worth spending the short amount of time you have on this planet looking at digital representations of it, of reality?

 

I used to be obsessed with new phones and cameras, I had some of the most high-end phones back in the days when phones with cameras were first available. I was taking so many photos and recording so many videos. One time I remember I went to a school holiday (in a camp sort of a thing) and I had an Alcatel from 2003 (brand new) with less colors than my shoes that are blue with white :)) and a camera of such a low quality that you could identify people from trees, but not the other way around :). Anyways because I loved technology I took the phone in this holiday and filmed/photographed everything, even though it only had 1.8MB for storage, but I deleted many photos as I wanted to take new ones. I used it so much and looked at the holiday/trip through its display for so long that I had troubles for weeks to be able to think or dream in more than 3 colors :). I mean it. It was so frustrating but if I tried to imagine a scenery I wasn’t able to imagine it in full colors. Only in Alcatel quality. All of that trip for me was in 3 colors. Same way, I suspect, such moments, if not most part of people’s lives, are in HD or 4k, but never in full eye-resolution.

Everywhere I go I see people with their phones taking so many photos, then they look at their screens to be sure the photo is good. They seem to pay little attention to wherever they are.

I choose not to slip into this kind of behavior again and I rarely take my phone out to ‘capture’ the reality, so rare that I have to explain it these days because it is not like I am taking only 30 photos a week, but maybe 10 a year. I realize now how relaxing and real it is to enjoy where you go (or when just live) instead of taking photos or record. Even if you say that you will only take a few photos, I suspect that unconsciously you are still looking at sceneries in terms of a good photo shoot, and this may diminish your enjoyment of that moment.

I know that it is interesting to look back at photos of you, more so when you get wrinkles :), but I hope to create a very interesting life for myself so that I don’t feel the need to look back, not even further, but at present.  When I was little I played all day long with my friends: hide and seek, football, and so many other games. I find it ridiculous to imagine now that we could stop and take a selfie while hiding when playing hide and seek and ‘hashtag’ it  #youcantfindme and put it on twitter. Or a group photo with the momentary football teams that we assembled on the spot. We enjoyed that moment and didn’t feel the need to post it somewhere or capture it so we can look at it in the future, because we were so busy with the present. We really felt like we were living and we won’t miss a thing if we don’t record the moment because tomorrow we start over again 🙂

A side note: I suspect that people who post photos with them or updates about how much fun they have, don’t have that much fun because if they had they would have little or no time or interest to post it on a social network for others to see. Don’t you think? I also suspect that most interesting people don’t have a FB or Instagram account :). They may not care about such things, but their present life that they are so busy living that they don’t need to record it.

I understand that there might be people enjoying taking photos and don’t see this as a big deal, but do you wonder how it would be to live in an era where there were no such devices? Maybe that would be more fulfilling for you? I’m just wondering this…

 

I’ve been in some very interesting places and took no photos at all, but I don’t feel like I had missed anything. I enjoyed the trip and this is what I do for the past years. Try to leave your smartphone at home when you go out, see how that feels :). Maybe it is a complete waste of time to record all these moments…..for whom are you doing this? And whoever that ‘whom’ is, in hundreds of years time (or less), your photos or videos may, more than likely, be completely irrelevant. So, I would suggest to live for yourself, and if you leave no trace of your life, no worries, all of our life’s traces will be gone eventually (and quite sooner I suspect because with so many photos you may find it hard to already see their relevance).

I don’t choose to live my dream, I just try to live 🙂