This was originally published on my old blog BackpackBook (Livro de Mochila), a project that blended literature and travel, sometimes just traveling in my lucid dreams. It ran as âViciados na Viagemâ on October 30, 2007.
It’s funny how, whenever we try to describe a dream, the result usually comes out surreal and psychedelic, a lot like those hippie trips, though without the bad ones.
What really matters, hippie or not, is that once people get a taste of travel they turn addicted and compulsive. The habit infests the mind and the dreams, sometimes becoming a virus you can only catch by spending time around somebody who has it.
It happened to me. I’ll confess I’m addicted to the high of travel. I only read, dream, talk and watch things derived from it, and this here is the result. I’m not alone and there are plenty of us. The teacher and educational psychologist Daniela “Restless” Ramos noticed this behavior in her patients and in herself. A trip seems to leave more of a mark than we imagine and contains elements that cause dependency. Fortunately no treatment has been found yet.
Dreaming about trips
This addiction invades and changes our dreams, so travel and dreaming go together. Even when a trip isn’t necessarily the trip of your dreams, things happen in similar ways, since we frequently forget half the stories, everything happens very fast, sometimes without making sense and with a great deal of feeling. It was thinking about almost all of that that the Havaianas people put together some very trippy commercials.
That peace and love, and a pair of Havaianas too, deserve reserved space in the backpack.
In the middle of all that cloud of advertising, compulsive travel, dreaming as a profession and hippie energy (that look doesn’t fool me), you’ll find Ricardo Freire walking around with his backpack and his size 43 Havaianas, which he wrote yesterday about being proud to wear. That traveler is the host and the transmitter of the travel addiction, and he’s more “experienced” now, so be very careful.
VnV
This traveler has already encouraged and guided many new members into VnV, Viciados na Viagem, Addicted to Travel. He became captain of the group and, to disguise the community, changed the name to VnV, Viaje na Viagem.
It took me a while, but I got to the closing joke in the end. Congratulations, captain.