Reflection: Summer Sunshine

I woke up this morning from one of those scary dreams where someone died and I'm not sure who. With Benadryl in my system, I went back to sleep for quite a while -- and the next dream cut through some of the turmoil but not all.

Long later I woke up to Summer Sunshine. Step Into Seattle Farmers Market was today's Squidoo Summer Sunshine winner -- $99 to my selected charity (the Grameen Foundation) and $99 to me. Well -- the person yesterday evening who I gave almost the last $.50 in my purse to for a crucial phone call said the karma would come back. He said the karma comes back when you think you can't take another step.

The next blog entry might (once again) appear under this one. Some posts I start but don't finish right off.

Reflection: Dream Spaces

Before I talk more about dreams, I want to backtrack a bit. I haven't hung out much on the forums on the eduFire much for months, though I've logged in regularly for business (and I've been on the Squidoo forums). Now here's the reason for the disappearance off the one forum: Some people do know about my fears of things happening to people. When I started to expand my social contacts so much online... well, I was a little anxious about it. So many people to keep track of... and things happen to people, and people die.

I'd been hanging out on that platform a couple months when a fellow tutor who was really active on the forums sort of disappeared. There was a thread going on about the disappearance for some time -- weeks at least. People who communicated with him through other platforms (email? Twitter?) said he wasn't answering. I heard he'd been quite ill... Well, it was then that I started getting squeamish about hanging out on the forums there. I was on one day and a post someone wrote about what she'd learned from the guy, by gummit, it sounded like a eulogy.

Flashforward to today. I logged in to the system for a class that actually I did't think anyone was coming for and perhaps with my touchpad, I glazed over some link I didn't know I touched. I found myself on the class page of the person I did orientation with. He had new strategizing class for tutors. I thought oh, I'll sign up for that, need to get back to socializing over there -- ah, and for some very pragmatic reasons. So I looked at the attendee list, and I saw... the disappeared tutor.

Now here's where I return to the theme of dreams. It wasn't the night before, but the one before that that... well, here's a bit of the dialogue:

"You haven't been on the platform for so long."

"No, you haven't."

Reflection: My Dreaming Mind(s)

Having read quite a bit of brain science -- and quite a bit about those different parts of the brain that have to work together -- I can understand how a person could have a 'divided mind'.

My mind is less divided than most, more singleminded -- except for sometimes when I'm asleep. See, I have generally a very responsible mind when asleep. My sleeping mind isn't obsessive like my waking mind, and it tends to avoid topics that might upset me. And my sleeping mind occasionally seems to know far more than my waking mind -- it knows things I honestly don't know how it knows -- and I have a habit of listening to it and taking its messages quite seriously.

Occasionally, though, when I've had the wrong thing to eat before bed, or when something is physically wrong, my mind can get a little hyper... and then it wants to explore/ try out negative possibilities. What if... it asks. Ah, but then another part of my sleep brain is like... Uh oh, oh boy, we can't have this! And that second part goes around trying to clean up the mess. (Think of Sleeping Beauty, where the banished fairy says the princess will prick her finger and die, but then another fairy says oh no, she won't die, she'll just sleep for a hundred years.)

Reflection: Blooming Out of Season

It was January, my first year in Seattle, when I dreamed about a rhododendron putting up pink out-of-season blossoms. "Stop!" I told the rhododendron. "Don't bloom now. You won't bloom when it's time." The rhododendrons will bloom before I get to Seattle, I fretted. Deeply sleeping, I didn't realize that I was in Seattle already.

A day or two later, I passed this small rhododendron sending out blossoms: not as many as in this picture, but a few riveting pale pink clusters.

A few years have passed... I hesitated for a long minute before selecting this particular rhododendron as my Squidoo avatar, but only because this particular rhododendron is there no longer. They removed the lovely little shrub, pulled it out by the roots -- this one and its partner, the other blooms-out-of-season rhododendron that used to regale a parking lot up near Safeway. Ah, where are you now? Do you blossom yet?

Reflection: Kitty Cat Dreams

In The Irrational Season, Madeline L'engle wrote of a student who asked her if she really and truly believed in God with no doubts at all. She replied, "I really and tuly believe in God with all kinds of doubts."

I wrote in an earlier post that I would tell the story of the 'cat dreams'. Today I will do that. I have to exert some caution in telling the story because different people interpret it differently. I think that most folks I know have some belief in anomolous communications, but some people would surely say this is irrational. I think there is something in each of us that says that can't be or else that must be - and that 'something' colors how we interpret things, from other's personal experiences to studies that attempt to be scientific and controlled. I remember in college, a professor recounted a study where people prayed for plants [mung beans?] and the prayed-for plants grew better. At the time, I was upset by the implications, and I did so want to hear about the flaws of the study! In the past ten or twelve years, I've become very interested in the science behind anomolous comunication, from dreams to prayer.

With that said... It was right after my father died, I think, that the Midnight and Seafoam dreams started. The cats I grew up with would show up in dreams that weren't even particularly about them. Considering the general illogic of the dreams, my math skills were good: "How old are you now, Seafoam? Twenty-eight?"

The dreams went on for a year and accelerated to something like one a week. One I remember well: Midnight bolted across a road as I watched, frozen. When she got across, she turned into something like a cat mascot and bear-hugged me. A few days before things came to a head with Maui, I had a dream where I was reliving the chronic illness of one of them, and taking it much harder than I had in real life (as I hadn't lived with them for years, and Maui was very much my baby by then). The last thought before I fully awoke that morning: This visit will be the last.

I walked though everything believing in God with fewer doubts than usual.

Reflection: Dreams (1)

I once read that if a dreaming person looked at a clock twice in succession, it would say different things each time. You mean other people can see clocks in their dreams? I thought. My visual acuity tends to be mole-like. A few times a year, I have a dream where I actually see print; those dreams tend to linger on in my mind and I file them away.

The night I read that article, I attended a dinner party in my sleep. The person next to me was looking at the clock repeatedly. It appeared she was doing a 'reality check' to see if she was awake or asleep, probably because she was trying to trigger a lucid dream.

It didn't make sense. "Why are you doing a reality check in my dream?" I asked.

I looked at the clock myself, willing it to say something, the way an awake person might try to call up a picture in their imagination. "It says... 2:00," I determined. I looked back at the clock, but this time I didn't put in the effort it would take to make numbers take on dim shapes. "It says 3:00," I announced glibly.

I determined that I was asleep, and wouldn't be for long.

Oddly, my visual acuity seemed to get better at the moment I knew I was asleep, like in The Wizard of Oz, when the color suddenly comes on. In the moment or two I before the dream faded, I walked to a corridor that led to a bathroom, and there I studied the tiles : They were large peach-colored slabs, like I had seen somewhere in waking life.