What seems like not too long ago, I was “living the dream” of residing & DJing in Bali. (Jeezus, how time flies, where seven years seems like “not long ago.”) I knew three years prior to making the move, that was where I needed to be. I set my sights on the target, waited for correct timing, and executed. It was fucking grand.
Near the end of my time there, it felt I was coming to a close with DJing. I did a small handful of gigs upon arriving back to Canada, and that was it. Suppose one could say I unofficially, informally “retired” from my main profession of DJing seven years ago, at age 33.
Since… there’s been this odd phenomena I can’t quite logically figure out: recurring bad dreams about DJing.
For the last seven years, I dunno if there’s been even one good dream about DJing; yet maybe about once a month, I have a badone.
What the fuck is going on in my subconscious?
I don’t recall having a history of recurring dreams, good or bad. This DJ-dream thing is but one of the only two subjects that semi-regularly pesteringly pops back into my dream state - the other, being a “friend” (though I nearly despise using the term now) from junior high & high school; the dreams of/with which always have a tone of discord, antagonism & ill-feelings. I can’t recall when either began, but the DJ ones have definitely stood out since quitting (though they might’ve began earlier).
It doesn’t matter where the dream takes place, what gig or music I’m playing in them, they’re always unsettled as fuck. Scrambling to find songs in a rush with painful gaps of silence; turntables setup on a shaky foundation with skipping needles; nagging insecurities of feeling nowhere near the “cool” DJ archetype and disconnected with those I’m playing for; more scrambling for songs, inadequately prepared, plagued with hypersensitivity to the inevitability of fucking up. Rinse & repeat in different variations.
It kinda sucks, this creative art I once loved having apparently left such an imprint on my subconscious that these rattling sensations haunt me years later in my sleep hours.
Though, for full honesty in this disclosure: to say it was “my dream” to DJ for a living would’ve been inaccurate. Though I may have frequently told myself, even before others, that I was “living the dream of DJing in Bali,” that depiction may surely have been biased/slanted - sounding great & alluring, satisfying to some aspect of the ego that found importance & glory in the “coolness” of it, yet not 100% authentic.
Rewind 23 years…
I began DJing for fun in the final year of high school. I’d started playing piano at 5, transitioned to guitar at 11, got good fast and started writing & recording my own songs, and played in both a rock and jazz band in high school - though it was only at 17 that DJ started calling. I’d never really gotten into any electronic music yet and just started exploring hip hop, so I barely had any idea what a DJ even actually did; but there was a magnetism drawing me in. And once I took the leap to buy an entry-level set of turntables and mixer, I was hooked.
Like with guitar, I picked it up fast - impressively pulling off a dope performance at the local DMC competitions only 3 months later (this before the days of cell phones being an integral part of life - I wish I only had the foresight then to actually record it, fuck); and putting the classic 4-track cassette recorder I’d used earlier to produce my own songs for crafting my first couple creative mixtapes the following year. Those were the good ol’ days - getting blazed in my parents’ basement and places in Banff, just playing with the art of turntables, exploring unchartered territory in sonic alchemy. No expectations, no goals or ambitions, simply living in the moment and fucking loving it.
A couple years later, I’d moved to Vancouver for university. By then, entrepreneurial ambitions had started to stir. I had bought an Akai MPC2000XL to start producing beats, caught inspiration from the examples of hip hop moguls & superproducers, and set my sights on similar outcomes of music-driven wealth & fame. Knowing there were bound to be some steps in between where I was and the grandiose targets, it dawned on me that it might be worthwhile to start DJing “professionally” - simply to earn some extra money while attending school and to facilitate making connections in the industry. So, I did.
Breaking into the scene wasn’t smooth or easy as an introvert, stepping out of my comfort zone to go meet other promoters & DJs. I wasn’t really into clubbing or raves, but did what was necessary to open a few opportunities. And by the time I broke down crying over accounting homework a couple months into second year of uni, knowing continuing post-secondary education wasn’t for me, I’d hit it off with a DJ agent and intuited it’d be worth the leap to quit school and trust the path of DJing for a living would open up. A couple months later, I was officially welcomed onto the roster, having transitioned from DJing for fun to it paying the bills.
While the first 8 months were amazing, the whole vibe of the situations changed after that. Though I went full-on hyperfocus at the start, high on the expansiveness & thrill of it all, I became complacent in a comfort zone. The novelty began wearing off, the ideas I had for branching out to bigger promoters & gigs in the city fizzled out, and my whole relationship with DJing transformed as conforming to the requirements of the job (versus exploratively doing whatever the fuck I wanted with it back in the basement, driven solely by passion & curiosity rather than the need for a paycheque.)
Other entrepreneurial ambitions persisted as dabbling in a spectrum of studies and side projects, though I kept up with gigs for the years to come in order to keep a roof over head and fed. I still aspired towards success producing music… though perpetually procrastinated on actually doing it. Years ticked by. I bounced from Vancouver to Thailand and back a couple times, to Phoenix - at which point DJing was no longer viable - and then to Vancouver Island. Though as the itch to relocate to Bali came, I once again saw DJing as a bridge that’d allow the leap to be feasible.
I got in motion with the tried-tested-and-true strategy - meeting a good soul brother on my 28th birthday in Victoria, opening doors to gigs again. Refining my skills and preparing my music collection (with a 100-CD spindle of music burned, only to find out upon arriving in Bali that everyone was simply using hard drives), I got back in the game - and started planting seeds by researching the scene in Bali, contacting DJs, promoters, and music directors. End of February 2012, I made another leap with no guarantees, booking a one-way flight to Indonesia. I had this idea prior to going that I’d just show up, introduce myself, and doors would open. Ha. Wishful thinking. However, just at the point my savings was about to run out a few months later, the gigs started flowing.
I didn’t get residencies at all the places on my list. But a couple months at Rock Bar scratched one of the biggest itches - epic beyond belief. And there were others nothing short of fantastic. As with anything anywhere in life, there were ups & downs, but I did it. And while once again, the energy of it all shifted from the initial thrill & novelty to being just to pay bills, for 4.5 years, I was “living the dream” - for what it was.
Perhaps DJing was not the ultimate dream, but the vehicle to make the dream of living in Bali happen. Either way, whether “I made it happen” or it was greater forces of the universe that helped conspire in my favor, it happened.
By most accounts, that’s a victory. Something to look back upon with a sense of satisfaction & pride (or whatever the unsinful equivalent would be).
So what the fuck is it that I’ve been guaranteed shitty recurring dreams of DJing as something stressful & troublesome?
I don’t have an answer to that question.
Maybe, it’s part of some subconscious ‘truth & reconciliation’ process. Of having to take a look at how the reality of what I thought was “the dream” actually wasn’t. A forced unravelling of the stories I told myself about what it was & represented. A deconstruction of the ego-identity I built around it, while confronting how I actually felt much of the time behind the mask.
I may have put on the persona and did my best to play the part, but I never was the “cool” DJ most people envision as the center of the party. I had the ability to rock the party - but honestly felt like an outsider much of the time, having to play a role to fit in rather than how naturally it might come for some others. (Then again, who knows, as there are probably alot of DJs that started off as the introverted music geeks in similar positions of discomfort as branching off from the hobby into the extroverted business side.) I was rarely relaxed - usually needing a few drinks to loosen up and get on the same vibe as the audience. I was frequently hypersensitive to the subtle fluctuations in/of the vibe, extra cautious and overthinking, on-edge, perfectionistic in always wanting to maximize the peak experience a set could be at all times (which makes alot more sense now, understanding I ‘am/have’ ADHD and observing the difference between an unmedicated dopamine deficit seeking those highs and stabilized chemistry from which the natural fluctuations aren’t as huge of a threatening deal).
As much as there were amazing sets, gigs, residencies, and moments, I honestly felt DJing professionally to be quite energetically draining by the end. As strong a word as “anxiety” is and I hesitate using it, there was probably a low-level underlying anxiety most of the time I played - and leading up to playing. I never really wanted the spotlight and status that I thought came with the territory, and felt uncomfortable trying to conform to the role - which I took on out of a sense of financial necessity, really. Maybe all the feelings coming up in these recurring dreams has merely been what I’d repressed the 12 years DJing for a living. Eventually needing to surface for processing & integration.
And not just for the sake of “making peace with the past,” but to establish such a foundation of honesty & clarity for our state of being here, now, and moving forward.
Like, how the fuck we gonna live a quality life if gaslighting ourselves by telling ourselves we’re “living the dream” - when that “dream” is actually some arbitrary conditioned/programmed idea - yet our true inner experience is not happy, satisfied, at peace. (As ‘unconventional’ as my path mighta been, there are probably alot of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals with white picket fences and 401k’s thinking they’re “living the dream” according to societal, cultural, and ego standards; yet plagued with soul unrest from the dissonance between inner truths of what they actually want & need.)
Maybe it’s partly my mid-life crisis in effect with the Pluto-square-Pluto tearing down my ego’s psychology and Neptune-square-Neptune dissolving its boundaries and bestowing disillusionment where due, that it is time for the stories I’ve told myself about who I was/am to get checked - for there’d be an incredibly high cost to continuing living in falsehoods. That no matter how much the “living the dream” narrative served my ego, it’s time to come clean, get real, face what’s been repressed, and recalibrate to what’s true and correct. Otherwise, perhaps the power of inertia woulda just kept things on a path of self-delusion, wasting more life away striving for & celebrating the wrong things.
If weren’t not being fully authentic with ourselves in any way, how could we expect to find/create the alignment to live a truly amazing life…? If trying to paint our pasts in a favorable light while suppressing/repressing the inconsistencies with that fabricated narrative, why would we realistically expect great results now and in the future with such a foundation of fakeness?
Maybe I’m “being too hard on myself” here. Maybe I do deserve the self-acknowledgement of the “successes” of “living the dream,” for what it was at the time - just as every person who chooses to pursue a path and walks it can reasonably pat themselves on the back. Yet, when the subconscious keeps speaking a different story, it may be time to consider all sides of a story and take a proper look at what lessons that repressed stuff has to give.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there was some connection between this whole subconscious DJ thing and my ongoing conflicts with producing music. After all, with all the weight put into the story of “living the dream” DJing in Bali, there’s bound to be spillover & intertwine with what all else the ego invested into regarding its dreams for producing, both having been integral part of my identity-construct; and as presented with the subconscious’ hauntings of repressed disturbance with the reality of that “dream” years after, would it not make sense to heed the guidance of conscious dissonance as pursing this other musical “dream” born so long ago (that doesn’t even hold the sparks of joy & inspiration it once did or “should”)?
Maybe the “bad dreams” are not just those we have at night, but the ones pursued in our waking life that aren’t truly ours from the deepest depths of our heart & soul.
As much as people talk about “living the dream” with positive implications, perhaps not enough of us distinguish between whether those/these dreams are actually good or bad ones - and what the subtleties & nuances are that may shift and tip the scales from former to latter as they progress.
Sure, many of us may have some innate psychological tendency towards viewing our pasts preferably, hyping ourselves up, and favoring our choices; but if not being neutrally objective with ourselves about both the yin & yang, how could we even tell whether the content of recurring “bad dreams” is ‘just a dream’ or a reflection of what our egos don’t want to look at in our waking lives? If the latter, how much more of this limited life are we willing to let be a bad dream due to our failure to be honest with ourselves about what hasn’t been working and course-correct accordingly?
While some might read all this and conclude I’m “overthinking,” that just ought to celebrate the successes of my past and carry on, do any of us really wanna be that guy/gal holding onto yesterday’s victory to validate their worth, like the 50 year old still flexing his high school championship wins? And either way, can any of us really move forward to “bigger & better” wins without fully learning from yesterday’s lessons and growing to integrate them properly?
Life’s lessons can be both perplexingly simple and overwhelmingly complex. A lot “easier said than done” to learn & integrate, sometimes.
It’d be great to “master reality” to such a degree that I could simply conclude this 2600 word digression from the seemingly innocent observation on recurring bad dreams about DJing was merely overthinking or another ADHD tangent, make some Tony Robbins-approved decision to wrap it up, and refocus on some new set of fantastical dreams to achieve. Yet life don’t always work like that, no matter what the know-it-all self-help gurus selling $4997 weekend seminars insist. A dozen years of a career leaving 7+ years of residual anxieties & unsettledness in the subconscious is probably gonna take a bit more to process than some NLP parlour-trick. And if I were to insist on “bouncing back” and choosing some new fancy alluring dream, it’d probably just be falling straight back into the same pattern/trap.
So here, I humble myself to admit: I don’t fucking know what “my dream” is as this point. Maybe I never fully did, and just tried to pretend because I thought it was necessary to know.
Maybe some dreams are ‘given to’ us. Maybe there are times we go without such clarity. Maybe there are times we end up living out “bad dreams” because we weren’t fucking honest enough with ourselves about what we wanted & needed or that we didn’t know and accepted sub-par options out of discomfort with the uncertainty.
Blah, blah, blah.
Now that was a rant.
Hopefully, full of seeds - some of which shall land in the fertile soil of your (sub)consciousness and sprout in due time, to later bear fruit of time & energy saved from painful trial-and-error as navigating your way through some of these testing twists & turns of human life on planet earth.
Or some shit.
Take what thou wilt. Throw away the rest.
✌️☯️🙏
Yeah, maybe "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". I occasionally have dreams that I am back in one of my retail jobs and I panic for a bit that I am still in that job until I wake up and realize I am not. I didn't have an emotional connection with that job like you clearly did with DJ'ing though.
I think the norm is not figuring out what we want to do in life for a long time. Some get it while others don’t. Look at the guy who started KFC. He didn’t do it until he was retired! That’s always stuck with me.