Personal Friday Night Post

This post is quite personal, and I suppose may not fit in on my work blog. However the only reason I was prompted to write about it, was when I had an 'aha' moment about social media and celebrities.

I had a dream last night about someone semi famous, who I don't normally ever think about. In the dream there was a connection. . . call it friendship, call it love, it was a dream and that was all it was. He is a stranger, but he wasn't in my dream.

I woke up, told my husband about it, and it quickly seemed to fade as my day went on. However when I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep again tonight, the dream started to replay.

I wondered to myself, how we can have dreams about people we don't know, especially emotionally intimate dreams. We wake up thinking we know the person, that we share some special secret, or that something about the experience was somehow real. We think all of the sudden they are going to care about what we have to say.

Of course this dream peaked my curiosity and as I was relaxing on this fine Friday evening, I looked him up on Instagram to see if I really would think he is as attractive as I did in my dream, since I'd never thought of him that way before. It was like I was going to look at him for the first time or something. But I quickly grew bored looking at his photos and all the comments from the people he will never respond to. It made me think about "celebrities" and how social media just separates them that much more from us, which I know, seems counter intuitive.

Yes you can see the photos of the train ride he posted, or a pretty flower, or the sunset. But it's sad to see so many people responding with such purposely down to earth comments, yet these regular human things we say to one another look so pathetic when they are said to someone too elite to respond, and never acknowledged.

I don't blame them, nor would I expect them to be able to answer, it's not about that. I just had this dream that made me think we were both the same kind of human, only to remember, I suppose we are not. You can tell your friends things, you can even tell non-famous strangers things, and they are heard. But if you tell a celebrity these same somethings, they're just thrown in with the rest of the pile, and all of the sudden your completely meaningful feelings, mean nothing.

It's just one more way social media "connects" us.

If you're curious who it was, I wouldn't mind telling you. Hey, I didn't ask to have the dream. But I wouldn't want anyone to think I was bringing him down... he is a beautiful song writer and he is probably a beautiful human being. But I wouldn't really know, after all he is just a stranger to me, and really, to the rest of the world too.