Living the Dream

Do you dream often? Do you like having dreams? Do you remember your dreams? Have you learned anything from your dreams?

“Living the dream, Hou tsai meng chung.” J told me when we first met each other 4 years ago in the Officer’s Bar on deck 4 forward. He has sailed for about 10 years. “That’s the only thing I know how to say in Chinese.”

I giggled, what kind of sentence is that? And that’s the one thing that you wanted to learn in another language?

Little did I know, “living the dream,” means much more to a seafarer. It is, actually their lives, and mine, for the following four years as well.

What makes it a dream? Why would we say we live in the dream, you might ask.

A dream could be so isolated and irrelevant from our normal daily lives. No matter what kind of dream we had, we proceed our next day as previously planned. We might get inspirations and ideas from the dream, but we might also forget about it the moment we wake up. That's kind of how living on a cruise ship feels like in life, all the luxury and glamour, a long dream that lasts for months.

A few days ago I messaged J and asked how he is doing, guess what I got as a response?

“Hey, living the dream of course.”

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Hello, thank you for visiting my blog.

I am a classical trained musician. For the past 4 years, I floated with my violin on a not-so-small ship.

During this pandemic, I started thinking a lot about my life on the ship, the years of living in the dream. Would I call it a sweet dream or a nightmare, do I wish I never had dream, what I learned from it, what were some of the special moments, how it changed my life as both a musician and a human being, and more.

My experiences obviously don’t say it all, but I write them down as a personal journal, and more than that, as a way to show my gratitude towards this crazy, amazing, unordinary, adventurous dream.