The Sands of Time

A story dedicated to Aaron Mandel

As I sit in my room trying my best to not go blind from staring at a computer screen, I see myself in 20 years staring at the same screen, having accomplished nothing more than perhaps making some credit card company all the richer. I think about how I could spend every day as it was my last, and all the other bullshit motivational quotes that people slap onto a poster with a bald eagle or a crew team. Every day I lament the passing time, and yet every day I wake up and waste it again, like the lessons of the previous day were somehow lost in the depths of sleep. Perhaps that is the price of dreaming. Perhaps when I dream about scaling a mountain, the price I pay is losing the time to scale that mountain during my waking hours. Perhaps each man can only experience some things once, and if those things are dreamt then it is lost to you forever.
What if I dream of a red ocean? If I dream of things not in reality, does that mean that somewhere, someplace, there is red ocean yet to be discovered by a man, not in his dreams, but with his eyes? I take a small amount of solitude in this idea. There are many joys that I visit in my sleep, and to know that these things may be real to a man sometime in the future or at some point in the past means that something I have or will live has only been dreamt of by some men, after long hours in front of their computer screens has made them too tired to work.