I had a strange dream last night about the OC

I had a strange dream last night about the OC. Technically, it was a dream about The OC, the TV show, but it was a beautiful dreamscape (hence, strange that it would come in the TV show package…), more nearly resembling the place embodied in my heart’s desire. In my dream’s TV show, the emphasis was not on the ironic comedy or the voyeurism into the white nouveau riche socialite culture – which don’t get me wrong, are precisely what keep bringing me back every Thursday night – but instead, it was about the terrible majesty of the ocean, Salty Mother of Life, and the terrible ache of first love – albeit in the unlikely actors of Ryan and Marissa. In this dream, I think I was Marissa.

I was listening to Purple Rain last night as I was falling asleep, and to one phrase in particular: “I could never steal you from another.” I thought, what a perfect expression of true love; the refusal to strive for the beloved as an object or a conquest, as is the wont of lovers; the abject fear one feels for an august beloved, when the love is overwhelming and sincere (because it’s my belief that we can never engage in relationships with people unless we despise them just a little; that is the difference between love and relationships, between childish idealism and adult pragmatism); and above all, the absolute subjugation of one’s will to the true happiness of the beloved. “I could never steal you from another.” The philosopher Bang recently wrote that no love is unconditional or unselfish; and though I agree on the unconditional part, I know that there is such a thing as unselfish love. That was the story of my first love, to much of my gnashing of teeth, I could never steal him, because it was almost like I didn’t want him. And though since then I have loved just as blindly and as idiotically as I did when I was 15, that was the one time I loved unselfishly.

Imagine my joy when I encountered that feeling again in my dream! True, I was in (tacky) character. I can only describe that joy as being like that of the father in the parable, who receives his prodigal son. My Marissa character was in love with the Ryan character in this total abnegation of self, and in my dream, I saw myself making again all the helpless blunders I made when I was new at relationships, and fervently in love – before I learned all love must fade, and before I grasped that simple Newtonian law that what goes up must come down. For example, I told him exactly how I felt, and I formed expectations. It was a little painful to watch – but oh! it felt wonderful to let go.

Beaches in Orange County are far more beautiful than the beaches in Los Angeles, and they have none of that personality you see them with on The OC. Actually, they have a little bit of that personality, because it’s true that, say, Newport is crawling with pretty-boy yuppies and their sissy female counterparts. But the important thing – and this is my point – is that all these peripheral people get washed away into the background noise once you feel the ocean, and the only thing filling your consciousness is the surge of your primordial life. This is the real glamour of the OC; it’s the OC I met in my dream, and the one I miss. In my dream, I was standing under a pier with my beloved (saying stupid things like, “Please be there for me”) while enormous waves, hill-sized, washed over the beams above us, and trickled in at our feet. Enormous waves that never broke (presumably, a person could surf on one forever). We should have been swallowed by these waves, but instead, we stood watching them, protected, as if they were in an aquarium.