Dreams of greatness

Over the past few weeks, I’ve become much less connected. I kind of like it. There’s much less pressure when I don’t feel like I MUST get to the computer to check the updates from the Twitterverse, or to have all of the items in my RSS reader marked as read. I haven’t been spending less time in front of the computer, just less time actually creating new content. The fact that school has started recently hasn’t helped.

I had a dream the other night (before the one where I was in front of my class naked), and that dream involved bagpipes (what else?). I played a really good Massacre of Glencoe in a piobaireachd competition, and ended up in second place for one of the gold medal contests. I was absolutely thrilled by this, because after all it isn’t every day that a lowly grade 2 piper competes at the gold medal level. As a result of my low ranking and high placing, I was invited to play at the Glenfiddich, which is sometimes called the unofficial world championship for solo pipers. Ten pipers are invited to play, and winning one a of few major prizes (or winning last year) will earn an invitation.

I booked my plane ticket and traveled to Scotland for the Glenfiddich (I must have been there for the first competition too but have no recollection of that part), and decided not to play because I didn’t feel like learning four new piobaireachds in a month.

One of the things that struck me as quite odd was that the competition was judged blindly (which very rarely happens… I’ve only ever heard of it happening once, and that was a band contest). The three judges were sitting at their table, separated from the competitors by a line of tall potted plants, wearing sunglasses and shielding their eyes with theirs hands so as not to see who was playing.

That’s about where my memory of the dream starts to get a little fuzzy (because that always happens), but I do remember the judges talking out loud and making comments about the sound of each player’s pipes while he was tuning.

I won’t try to try to recognize symbolism or assign meaning to this, because I don’t believe that dreams mean anything. I’ll just keep sleeping (and probably dreaming too) and keep piping. Rock on.