Dream speak
This was originally posted on my own site.
I had a double-whammy of a stress dream during the week.
I dreamt I was at a conference where I was supposed to be speaking, but I wasn’t prepared, and I wasn’t where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there. Worse, my band were supposed to be playing a gig on the other side of town at the same time. Not only was I panicking about getting myself and my musical equipment to the venue on time, I was also freaking out because I couldn’t remember any of the songs.
You don’t have to be Sigmund freaking Freud to figure out the meanings behind these kinds of dreams. But usually these kind of stress dreams are triggered by some upcoming event like, say, oh, I don’t know, speaking at a conference or playing a gig.
I felt really resentful when I woke up from this dream in a panic in the middle of the night. Instead of being a topical nightmare, I basically had the equivalent of one of those dreams where you’re back at school and it’s the day of the exam and you haven’t prepared. But! When, as an adult, you awake from that dream, you have that glorious moment of remembering “Wait! I’m not in school anymore! Hallelujah!” Whereas with my double-booked stress dream, I got all the stress of the nightmare, plus the waking realisation that “Ah, shit. There are no more conferences. Or gigs.”
I miss them.
Mind you, there is talk of re-entering the practice room at some point in the near future. Playing gigs is still a long way off, but at least I could play music with other people.
Actually, I got to play music with other people this weekend. The music wasn’t Salter Cane, it was traditional Irish music. We gathered in a park, and played together while still keeping our distance. Jessica has written about it in her latest journal entry:
It wasn’t quite a session, but it was the next best thing, and it was certainly the best we’re going to get for some time. And next week, weather permitting, we’ll go back and do it again. The cautious return of something vaguely resembling “normality”, buoying us through the hot days of a very strange summer.
No chance of travelling to speak at a conference though. On the plus side, my carbon footprint has never been lighter.
Online conferences continue. They’re not the same, but they can still be really worthwhile in their own way.
I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart: Front-end Focus on Monday, August 17th (and I’m very excited to see Ire’s talk). I’ll be banging on about design principles for the web:
Designing and developing on the web can feel like a never-ending crusade against the unknown. Design principles are one way of unifying your team to better fight this battle. But as well as the design principles specific to your product or service, there are core principles underpinning the very fabric of the World Wide Web itself. Together, we’ll dive into applying these design principles to build websites that are resilient, performant, accessible, and beautiful.
Tickets are $350 but I can get you a discount. Use the code AEAJER to get $50 off.
I wonder if I’ll have online-appropriate stress dreams in the next week? “My internet is down!”, “I got the date and time wrong!”, “I’m not wearing any trousers!”
Actually, that’s pretty much just my waking life these days.
This was originally posted on my own site.
