I am 20 years old, in my third year of college and I almost didn’t make it that far in my lifespan. Throughout my life I have figured out what I as a human being am capable and not capable of doing. I have pushed my body and my spirits to the furthest I thought they could ever go and yet in the future I prevail to somehow surpass what I once thought was unachievable. I like to believe I am a very realistic person, but what one thinks or hopes may not be necessarily true. It is a mindset that is truly cursed in every way, how I could acknowledge one thing will never happen, but dream that it may. It is in recent times of my life that there is a more powerful tool in all of us to succeed, in how we all have the ability to dream and strive to achieve who we really want to be. We can live whatever fantasy we want in our heads, as often as we want as long as we can safety come back to reality.
As a computer engineering student I am very good at one thing: counting. I could count all fucking day if I had to. I’m absurdly good at it too. In high school my friends would joke I would grow up to be an accountant. Whatever requires counting and calculating, there’s never a thing in my life that I haven’t been able to do with this ability. Counting lines, counting 1s and 0s, counting vhdl logic and whatever else requires number crunching. I do it every day in order to succeed in life. Here’s the fun part though, I absolutely hate it. It’s the most monotonous and repetitive action one would ever have to do. People absolutely hate counting because of their lack of skill in it, I hate counting because it is the best thing I can do.
The real trick here however is that not everything we achieve is what we think about. I know I am really good at counting, because the same thing is being provoked in my head. There are other things I am good at if I think about what I don’t think about, when I’m dreaming. The thing about dreaming is, you’d never really think about dreaming while you were in one. Dreaming is when your head is full of thought, but it isn’t given any direction and goes whatever way it choses to. As it turns out, Dreams are truly what I’m best at. I can remember dreaming as a 5 year old kid how I would be swinging on my swing set and but I really would be envisioning myself as something else. Sometimes I would be spider man, other times I would have telekinesis and would move things around in my backyard. I would just swing and literally dream about the world around me changing. When I was in middle school I got really good at it. I would set up atmospheres in my head when listening to music and just dream a whole world pacing around my room. I would always listen to electronic music as I never really liked vocals on any track and it was easiest to ease my thoughts. Instead of changing the setting of the room, I would start changing the room itself and envision myself in a new place.
This was easily my favorite thing to do as I would stay up for hours. It got tricky when I realized what I was capable of and thought that I would never surpass it. I would start to doubt my dreams, saying that they would be able to complete them. The effect of dreaming began to dimmer away and coming in would be my thoughts not having the dreams add up. It was around when I was done with high school I would achieve another effect. I would be able to just sit somewhere and imagine something that appeared as my life but was always in a much different angle. I would be doing something that I could do, but wasn’t always capable of. It was likely due to the visualization rituals the swim team would go through in order to prepare for the end swim meet. At this point, I would be able to simply just let go of life and dream that it were going differently.
The dreaming did not always have the most pleasant experience however. Often I would myself having my dreams taunt me, of something that I wanted but couldn’t get. My logical brain would kick in and start drawing lines in my head of where I thought my expectations should be. It was almost as my immersive brain would be clashing against my logical brain. The better I got at dreaming, the quicker and more damaging the effects were. I lost many nights of sleep over this battle and would almost be taunting myself of what I wasn’t able of doing. Trying to get girls involved with my life really kicked this off, always being discarded or being used as a tool by someone else. I felt hopeless, thinking about how I had no control in the outcome and how there wasn’t a lot I could do to change it. This would drive me insane and I was starting to doubt if I could really live with myself. It made me feel alone, as it made me vulnerable and would play a repeated sequence in my head to taunt me. I know myself pretty well and knew that I didn’t want to become a crutch to others and kept to myself. I was scared to tell anyone how I was.
Dreaming was just so powerful though and in the right scenarios I would be able to just visualize the most amazing things. It would just be the polar opposite idea maybe in the next 10 minutes and with an identical magnitude of strength. I couldn’t control my dreams either, leaving me with only one choice: to accept them. Getting over bad events from my life is the hardest thing I have ever done. The closer I was to achieving my dreams, the harder I felt the effects on my mind. Over the past few years I would envision bad dreams for months on end, never seeming to be able to accept them. It would usually take something to get my hopes up for the bad dream cycles to end.
This summer I reached a point where I believed that there was not going to be any amazing events capable of switching my dreams. Every little thing would creep into my mind and remind me of how I was incapable of achieving my dreams. I saw it coming though, as when I saw a therapist months ago they saw a serious sign of depression in my life. I needed help as I realized a very dangerous idea in my head and started to plant seeds to start an incredibly bad dream to come. While I may still feel the effects of the seeds now, a critical event of my life would change the way I see everything now. Not even kidding, I would play a game called Chrono Trigger.
Chrono Trigger is a JRPG developed by SquareSoft and released for the SNES. It is said that Square assembled their best staff to lead all of the main aspects of the game dubbing them “the dream team.” Many websites will say Chrono Trigger is the best RPG to have ever been made, I will atest to how it got me through one of the most critical phases of my life. The world of Chrono Trigger is immersive, with an immense timeline and story depth. The game was able to show me what the dreams of others achieved, and the worlds they envision themselves in. It was unbelievable the game had such a powerful effect on my head, but I would start to see my life as a story. The places I’ve been and the events I have been are so surreal they appear in my head as a movie. At that point, I would just see my life as a movie and suddenly the terrible dreams I had began to vanish.
I literally hated existence and all because of this stupid game I played on my computer for hours on end, I would really just forget about my bad dreams and simply move on with my life. I have no idea what did it for me, but I would listen to music from the game all the time and was always thinking about it. It’s just amazing what can do the most powerful things in the world.
I would like to say I have really moved past this point of my life, but nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. I battled with myself for years on end, simply just ruining my life for myself. Now I was back in control of my head, and now continue to navigate my way through life’s design. The movie mentality is just a great way to view my life as if it were another persons perspective. I still don’t know how to talk to girls, or what I even want to do with my life though, so maybe I’ll figure one of those out soon. Crazy how life works right? So yeah its all caused I played Chrono Trigger.