I had an odd vivid dream this morning about being in photographer mode for a while. It was odd in some of its detail, which is not unusual for a dream. It was encouraging because I’ve been wanting to see that part of me awaken since the beginning of the year and so far it won’t.

That part of me feels exhausted. Like I’ve said everything I wanted to say with a camera and now I have nothing more left to say. It’s all Been There, Done That. Since the start of the year I’ve taken multiple trips with one or more of my cameras to go find things to explore and, then come back home without so much as touching them. Now they just sit unused. I’ve thought about selling some of them, but I’ve a collection of good ones now and it’s almost for that reason alone I won’t. Instead of looking at my cameras as a photographer, I’m seeing them now as a collector. I feel like something inside of me is just draining away.

So the dream last night was welcome in a way. Oddly, in the dream I am a younger guy, but I was also aware that I’m working part time now, not fully retired anymore like I was. So I couldn’t just flit away and go looking for things to explore with my cameras. I’m driving the little green Prism., not the Mercedes. And I’m living in the apartment with mom, but it’s located in some new neighborhood I don’t recognise, but with easy access to the interstate. And my bitter abusive maternal grandmother is still living in the apartment with me and mom, and one reason I’m out and about is I’m getting away from her.

I really wish she would stop appearing in my dreams. But I suppose it’s she did a lot of damage and even at age 71 I’m still trying to recover from it.

It seems like it’s not quite the end of winter, but warm enough for shirtsleeves instead of a coat outside. I’m trying to think of where I can go when I only have a few days off. In this dream I consider driving to New Orleans, but it’s too far and I’ve done a lot of the points down south. I think I should go north, but there is still snow cover up north. I have an urge to just throw it all off and drive all the way to California. But no…I have to be back at work after just a few days.

So I go north, into Pennsylvania, and at a highway food stop I suddenly see something I want to get with my camera. What I have with me just then is the black Nikon F with the photomic FTn light meter head. It’s a really good shot. This highway food joint has as its trademark a pair of cowboy boots, and this particular one has a large fiberglass pair of them on a pole high up above the roof, sorta like how McDonald’s has their golden arches, and Bob’s Big Boy has that kid in checkered overalls. It’s the incongruity of that huge pair of cowboy boots on the pole standing watch up against the sky with the sunlight hitting them just so and the clouds in the background that are just right that attracts my attention. As I said, a vivid dream.

I raise my camera to my eye, turning on the light meter and taking off the lens cap as I do, only to discover I don’t have the right lens on it for this shot. It’s the 50mm and I almost always shoot with a 24. In my haste to get out of the apartment I only took that one camera and the lens that was on it.

So I attempt to back away to compose the shot I want of the thing I am seeing, and there is outside seating at this place so I have to navigate around the tables and other people eating there. And a young woman asks me about my camera and we get into a conversation about cameras because she has one too but it’s a different make and she wants to know more about the Nikon.

And I go into my speal about how I’m not really a Nikon person but a Canon person but sometimes I like taking the Nikons out because they have a different mechanical feel…and I wake up.

What was so encouraging about this dream was my photographer’s eye opened up for a while in it and I saw something I just had to get a shot of. That hasn’t happened in almost a year. But I don’t know if I can make it happen again in real life. As I write this I’m afraid that if I go somewhere with my cameras again the same thing will happen and I’ll come back empty handed because I can’t feel that part of me inside.

I’ve been thinking lately of putting up a new photo gallery on the website, a Best Of gallery where I put what I think is are the very best images I’ve managed to make over the years, the stuff I’m super proud of. Maybe working on something like that will reawaken that part of me inside. Or at least give it a good send off.