I keep having dreams about moving away to a different city. Usually it's Las Vegas in my dreams, but sometimes it's not. Last night, for example, I dreamed that I'd taken a job in Seattle, so I moved back there. Then, later this morning, I had a dream that I'd been transferred to someplace in Northern California, so I moved there. Over the last couple of months, I've dreamed a lot about moving to South Dakota.

I'm very interested in dreams. I think they can, at times, display pretty interesting interpretations of what goes on in our heads and in our lives. It seems that I read somewhere that dreams are what we experience as our short-term memories and thoughts are filed away into long-term storage. I suppose that's as good an explanation as any, of the biochemical process involved. Not that I really care about that - I just like the symbolism and the metaphors.

And sometimes there are hot girls in my dreams. And I get to have sex with them.

But I digress.

I don't think that I keep dreaming about moving to a different city because I want to move. Or even because I fear moving. I think it's yet another metaphor. New jobs, new cities, those are just the symbols that my brain chose to use as it processed my desire for a new life. I could have a new life right here, with the same job, with mostly the same friends. A new life which would be entirely self-contained, in my own head. It can consist of nothing more than my own attitudes and interpretations of the world around me. All I have to do is choose to start over, and my new life could begin.

I think that's what I want. To start over. But I'm afraid that would require a leap of faith that I'm not ready to take. Just as dreams can turn into nightmares, so can lives.

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Saturday afternoon, I took a nap. I dreamed that I'd gone to this guy's house, and he was cooking steaks for us. Problem was, he'd forgot to ask me how I wanted my steak cooked, so it came off the grill too rare for my tastes. So I put it back on the grill to let it finish cooking.

Once the steak had cooked, I took it from the grill and put it on my plate. It looked and smelled delicious. Then I woke up, before I got to take a single bite from the damn thing.

After I woke up, I was starving for a steak. I figured that I'd go to this Tucker's place and have one. I haven't been there for a while.

But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my dream hadn't really been about a steak at all. It had been about my own stubborn quest for perfection, and about my annoying tendency to wait too long for that perfection to arrive.

About how I wait too long, and how it's suddenly, terribly, horribly, too late.