Whither Intent?

(Image from here.)

It wasn't ever my intent to make a radio program about intent.  It was never intended, I should say.  I didn't have the intention.  & yet, here we are, less than a day from a Self Help Radio about intent.  How in the world did that happen?

It had been so long since I had been in a tent.  It must've been years, actually.  A tent, you know, a camping tent.  Not a giant tent-like structure that might house a farmer's market or a religious revival.  & yet there I was, in someone's tent.  & by the way, it was in a camping situation, not in a houseless person situation.  Here in Portland you see a lot of tents, often on sidewalks, or along the highway.  It's a big problem here, how to deal with them.  This was not that.  I was in someone's tent, somewhere where they were camping.

Oh shit, I forgot to mention, this was in a dream.  Yeah, I wasn't just wandering around some natural area, saw a tent, & went in.  No, this was a tent in a dream.  That was important, I'm sorry.  Yeah, I was dreaming I was in someone's tent.  But whoever's tent it was, that person wasn't someone I knew.  Just someone who had, previously in the dream I guess, invited me into their tent.  & like you do in dreams, they were talking to me about my radio show.

"Have you ever done a show about tents?" this person in my dream asked me.

The truth is, I couldn't remember, so I tried to look up my website on my phone, to see what themes I'd explored before.  But my phone couldn't find the website.  This happens to me a lot in my dreams, I try to find out information that I honestly don't know so I try to use a computer & because my brain doesn't know the information, it makes my computers not work.  In the dream I was embarrassed I didn't know if I had done a show about tents, & also that my web page didn't seem to exist, so I said, "I might have."

The person in the tent - & I couldn't describe them, I don't even know if I saw them, their tent was tidy but there was only one light, a Coleman lantern, just hanging in the center, illuminating camping gear & an unrolled sleeping bag - the person said, "In tents!  Intense!  In tent!  Intent!"

Perhaps sensing I might be harmed, I started to leave the tent.  The person said, "Do a radio show that's in tent in tents!  Intent intense!"

& I can't tell you how I knew the person wasn't just say "intense" or "in tents" over & over - somehow I figured out they were playing with the words.

When I woke, I tried to explain the dream to my wife, who was immediately bored by it, because it was, frankly, a boring dream.  (At some point in the dream I got to feed a deer, but that's not important to this story, but gosh! what a thrill!)  But there was a part of me that thought my mind was daring me to do a radio show that would be weird to do, so I decided - without looking around for songs - to do a show with the theme "intent," as a way to answer the challenge.  You'll have to wait till tomorrow to see how that worked out for me.

Yes, tomorrow - Monday morning - 6 to 8am on Freeform Portland, 90.3 & 98.3 fm, freeformportland.org.

Listen, as I may never let my dreams dictate a show theme ever again.