Current mood:	optimistic
Current music:	Blackmore's Night - Dandelion Wine
Entry tags:	dreams, gender, hope, love, me, music, night, photographs, starlight, summer, the future

The Garden of the Dreamer
I do so love music. I dive into the songs I love, and am enveloped in the emotions involved. I surf on the wave of these emotions, and can thus escape the mudane which otherwise creeps into life. I can weep within to songs such as My Immortal, dream and hope to Now We Are Free, and dance on a optimistic fairytale of love, such as with a majority of the Disney Eurobeat DDR mix tracks I own. Sometimes I feel like laughing at myself for being caught up in little worlds of emotion which no-one else seems to notice, especially when I compare that to my more academic interests such as my essays or reading the BBC News website.

Yet, I still feel like laughing. Not because I am being silly, but because I'm being me. Slowly but surely, I'm coming to love that more and more. Finding myself is quite an adventure, but one with no map and no sets of chapters to make reference easy. I could look back to last Summer, and attempt to compare, but would it lead me anywhere? There has been progress, but I'm by no means a new person, and defining myself is something I can never do anyhow. Words and pictures cannot tell you a person's soul. That comes about through something deeper and far more intricate. I can tell you my dreams, but I have so many, and you would read something into my choices. I laugh when I see my faults, my talents, and what makes me me. I am someone who would dance like a spellcaster amongst worlds of my own design, yet would at the same time utterly fail at maintaining any semblence of neatness on my desks. There's something inherently chaotic about dreaming.

Sometimes I wonder if I put the mental into sentimental. Sometimes I wonder if anyone else cares how I care. Sometimes I wonder if I wander, but there's a time for everything.

I would long to be in a special garden. It would be like a park, but natural. It would be at night, and a sky of a thousand stars would shine down from the deep darkness, with just a hint of sapphire which whispers of warm midsummer nights. There are other lights, man-made, but quiet and gentle, casting soft white glows rather than the harsh corruption of sodium yellow. Lights reflected on the water, shimmering gently in the cool breeze. Perhaps there would be a festival atmosphere, similar to those of East Asia, with lanterns only without the crowds. Lantern lit wooded paths alongside a stream upon which stars sleep. Perhaps it much quieter, a public space with its white lights resting in its solitude from the busy crowds of the daylight hours. Perhaps it is on a hill, and from the marble, the sea can be seen, with the distant lights of ships ploughing nocturnal waves and waterfront lights calmly rippling in their harbour reflections. Yes...and in this garden, I would spin and dance and sing to the starlight and the silence broken only by the sounds of nature's summer nights. I would wear white, or blue, soft, and deep, and flowing around me so I may float around this garden like the wind and the water. The warmth of the summer night would mean that I would not freeze in this gown of fantasy. Yes, I would dance, but I could not keep the moment for myself. I'd need someone there to share all the magic with...a friend...a lover...

Maybe someday. I hesitate to believe it is on its way, but part of me doesn't want to lose hope, part of me wants to ignore the rooves of reality and break out into the heavens I gaze upon beneath high skylights. I don't always have to dream, because sometimes dreams can come true, even if you never realised you had that dream to begin with.

Gender is still there, of course, and cannot be ignored. It's difficult when summer breezes arrive, and the girls are in their summerwear, going places and doing things I keep meaning to. I won't go on to produce an entire update along this line: there isn't really any need, as I've said so much before, and this is a hard image to focus on. It's all too easy to describe it as the blur it so often can be, and squinting takes a lot of you. It's something I have to live with, but I know that if I did not, I would take it all for granted. It's inevitabley the little things that make the difference, such as tears, tops and toilets, but never mind. As I said before, dreams can happen. My mental self-image is now closer to how I actually look than it used to be, and I can gain some comfort from that. Maybe a me in a soft-coloured winter sweater and even-longer curls will someday snuggle up warm in front of a window with someone who, despite the odds, proves to me how even the undreamt can come true.

So I cast myself ahead and above and laugh at myself, not in ridicule, but in the light tones of someone to whom the world temporarily shines like diamond. I will succeed, and will feel proud in my achievements, and I will then share whispers with those to whom all dreams are as insubstantial as the morning mist over the meadows, meadows I shall lie down in without a care in the world. It can happen. Music brings emotions that hint at all these things. Each song has its own whisper, and I can embrace them and, for a while, become that maiden dancing in the garden of dreamers. I will sing along, and I will imagine, and that, perhaps above all else, is why I do so love music.