Awake-to-What
Why Awaketodream? (originally posted January 25th, 2006)
People have asked me what the name of the site means, and since it is meaningful to me, I don’t mind sharing it (I am not the mystery woman that Finslippy is). It is not:
- new-agey type of mantra
- fantasy novel
- new concept for meditation
In reality, awaketodream was sort of the last, most memorable option for blog names that I could think of when I moved my blog over from it’s previous incarnation, the coaster, hosted on blogger (excuse me while I cough snidely in derision.) My first blog after I removed my blogger training wheels way back in July of 2003 was sleeplessinsurrey.net. At the time I lived in an adorable ikea-themed basement apartment and was fighting off an impending illness the likes of which would change my life completely.
Good time to start a blog.
Sleepless in Surrey came about because I lived in surrey, a very large city south of Vancouver, BC, and I felt safe enough among the 304,000+ of my neighbours to disclose the city I lived in. The main point of Sleepless was that I had just discovered blogging via Jordon Cooper, and due to previously mentioned impending illness, was spending large amounts of time awake in the middle of the night. (It was not yet my habit to stay up past my bedtime - I was a student then as I am now, but commuting to school added 1.5 hrs onto my wakeup time… I usually went to bed early.) I was also wading my way through a tangled and incredibly frustrating medical system, and thus had much to complain about. And so, sleepless was born.
Sleepless in surrey continued until the fall of 2004, when I went back to school, had surgery and generally sat in sackcloth and ashes. I had also moved to a much much smaller community, and I really debated whether to rename, and what to rename to. My new community was far too small to advertise where I lived in a blog name - too easy to find me. (Not that it would be hard, but let’s just not go giving out our personal info willy-nilly now…) Not that it mattered, because I did not have the time or mental energy to deal with it, and Sleepless had crashed under the weight of the 6000+ spam comments that had overwhelmed it - I had an old version of MT without blacklist, and couldn’t find anyone to reinstall for me.
So, sleepless lay fallow until august this year when I switched to wordpress, an infinitely more user-friendly blogging program. Which brings me to naming this blog. I wanted to bring some element of sleepless into it, even though I wasn’t sleepless for the same reason anymore and was in fact blogging at night more out of habit. All of the domain names I wanted to register were taken, and I couldn’t really come up with anything interesting. I finally decided that this blog would be different than sleepless, which had had a decidedly desperate feel to it that no longer fit with my life or the tone I wanted to set.
Thus, Awake to Dream. Now when I am awake at midnight, I am not sleepless but dreaming nonetheless of better, brighter things to come.
And hey, this way when I move I don’t have to change the name…