Last night, I did not sleep well. At all. You generally don’t get much sleep if you’re the leader of an underground resistance trying to help what’s left of the world’s population escape from alien detention camps.

Laugh all you want — I sure have since I woke up! I lost my good night’s sleep to an ongoing dream in which I was trying to break out of a half-school, half-sporting-goods-store building where aliens (who started out looking like they were from the cartoon Doug, but later morphed into your garden variety non-cartoon humans) were holding a few hundred people captive. And yes, at one point there was a camera involved: I “borrowed” someone’s little Pentax with a pancake lens to do “recon” for an escape attempt. Yes.

But here’s where I’m honestly finding a life lesson for myself to get me motivated for the day: Most of the people held captive by the aliens didn’t care. The aliens weren’t hurting us. They didn’t seem to have any sinister plans for us. We were well fed, and pretty much left to our own devices, as long as we didn’t try to walk out any of the doors. (Although crawling out windows apparently went unnoticed — these aliens weren’t very observant.) We were just stuck inside that big building, and we weren’t allowed to leave. Most of the people relaxed into their new routine; as I sneaked out a window for a recon mission, there was a room of teenagers and middle-aged men playing ping-pong behind me, and a hallway full of women slouching in chairs under fluorescent lights, reading old magazines. They couldn’t be bothered to join the rebel movement. Everyone was okay with the status quo, even if the status quo was alien imprisonment.

So our real-life everyday status quo probably doesn’t include behind held hostage by aliens — it isn’t nearly that dramatic, nor is it anywhere near as comical as it was in my dream. But is our everyday status quo what we want our lives to look like in another year or two? If we want to still be — figuratively speaking, of course — playing ping-pong instead of enjoying hard-won freedom, we should just keep on doing what we’re doing. Nothing will change. I would prefer to see some positive progress in my life rather than just accepting things the way they are and settling into the comfort of releasing bigger ambitions.

Maybe my not-so-sound sleep was worth it after all.

(And please, someone, tell me I’m not the only person who has dreams that are so utterly ridiculous.)

~ Laura