Tag: Dreams

The Connection Dream

My streak of dreams continue. I remember many. They generally flow into some semblance of meaning for me. I’ve had nothing disturbing. All are interpreted as useful, healthy, and reassuring dreams.

One of last night’s dreams was reassuring, but also amused me. I fell asleep in the office recliner after watching “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.” Tucker and Quinn joined me, sleeping on my lap and my legs. The lights were off, but the television was on. Once the movie ended, though, the Roku went into screen saver mode, displaying the date and time.

I dreamed I was being told, “Stay there. You’re okay. Don’t worry. Stay there. A connection needs to be completed.”

Drifting awake, I stared at the television. Anxiety trickled through my mind. I had the sense I was supposed to be doing something, and I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing.

But the dream voice said, “You’re okay. Stay there. A connection needs to be completed.”

Hearing that pushed questions along about what connections were being made. Some sort of update must be taking place, I concluded.

That satisfied my anxieties. Calmed, I returned to sleep. A little later, the dream voice said, “The connections are done. You’re good to go.” Waking up, I got up and went to bed. Awakening this morning, and thinking about it, I wish I knew more about the connections being made.

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Prepped

I’ve been writing in my head all morning. Now, here I am, coffee at hand, computer set up, ready to write. I feel like a little stopped up from all the mental writing.

That’s a perfect lead to my dream last night. It was all about a foreign woman trying to marry me — though she was married to another man, and he was present, and I am married, and my wife was there — my efforts to dissuade her, and then, my adventures with a toilet.

My recent dreaming has been a dream process. For the last twelve days, I’ve been awakening, remembering my dreams, and then knowing what they meant. Some of them were very specific about what to do with health issues, such as a foot bothering me. Others were about writing, and what I should do about something troubling me. I can tell you, and you can appreciate, it feels amazing to have such dreams.

So, last night’s dream was a little bit of a letdown. What especially troubled me was the end, when I was sitting on a commode and using it, and it started going forward. It was like I was riding a riding mower, except it was a toilet. After rolling the dream details around in my head down halls designed by M.C. Escher, I told my spouse the dream. She instantly provided a very satisfying explanation.

Okay, got that out of me. Now, for the rest. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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The Air, the Fitbit, the Writing, the Dreams

Our outdoor air sucks. Need more?

Smoke from wildfires is filling our air. The Air Quality Index leaped to one hundred fifteen last night. DANGEROUS. It hasn’t been hot, only into the nineties. We open the house at night to cool it off, and then close the blinds and windows during the day. Opening the windows last night sent us into coughing fits as wet smoke smells wafted in. Eventually, we donned masks.

Today isn’t as bad. The A.Q.I. is in the fifties, and officially, moderate. Visibility remains down. It’s like a white-out beyond a a few hundred feet.

All this wildfire smoke has reduced my Fitbit activities. Walking is way down, to five miles a day average. It’s not as critical as many other issues resulting from wildfires. None of the fires are directly affecting our community. We feel for all those being evacuated in those areas, and appreciate the firefighters’ efforts. If this stuff is terrible for me, a guy in his early sixties who considers himself in good health, those with emphysema and other respiratory issues must be deeply suffering.

I took to the Orson Scott Card method for visualizing and organizing the novel in progress. O.S.C. talked about just drawing places, like a city, and then adding details. With each detail and area added or defined, entertain questions about why those areas and details exist. I’ve done this exercise before, with excellent results. I wasn’t disappointed this time.

I had been editing the novel’s first draft. Halfway through that process, I perceived a problem. A new ‘greater arc’ was required as the solution. I could be wrong, but this is how I decided to address the issue. It’s essentially an epic. I like epics. Bigger is better.

This was decided over a four day period. Then, after deciding it was necessary, I went on a reading sprint. I finished reading two novels, and read two others, in five days. I also read fiction stories and news articles online. This reading stimulated my writing juices and invigorated my writing dreams. I found myself re-committed to who I was, and what I was doing. It’s a matter of taking a deep breath, turning on the computer, and putting the ass in chair, and the fingers on a keyboard.

This new arc takes place on a planet where technology fails. An outpost is established using outdated technology. Suddenly, it’s like living in a frontier castle. I loved that difference in direction from my usual challenges of visualizing the far future and other intelligent races.

I drew the outpost on my computer, and brainstormed about how the lack of technology affects them, and solutions and work-arounds. The team living in the outpost are hunting for people, but can’t use their suits or vehicles. They fall back to horses. Having horses adds more problems and dimensions.

So do the powerful windstorms endured on the planet. That’s why the outpost becomes a castle; something stout enough to survive the windstorms are necessary. That’s the iceberg view of all the scenes, problems, and challenges realized. I don’t want to give away more. Drawing and brainstorming in this manner was a catalyst to my imagination. I scrambled to capture ideas an create an event timeline. It resulted in *shudder* an outline. 

As an organic writer, the outline overwhelmed me. Suddenly, there it all was, this part of the novel mapped out in all its complications and key events. I could imagine, see, and hear them. Writing them was required. It’s daunting for an organic pantser. I decided I would scramble to write key scenes and moments, and patch them together with bridge and pivot scenes, and build the story in layers, much like I used to do when oil painting, or writing a business case, or analyzing data.

I think that whatever opened my creative floodgates also turned the dream valves to full open. I had six remembered dreams last night. Friends from my past were featured. My wife also made an appearance. Of course, maybe it was the eclipse opening the dream and creativity gates. Who can say?

Trying to capture details this morning diverted personal resources already earmarked for other activities. I resorted to dream summaries. The dreams were wild. Once again, my muses were prominently featured. They were attempting to guide and assist me in different manners. Sorting the chaos was a fascinating exercise.

Having your muses show up in my dreams injects high confidence levels. I felt empowered and emboldened when I awaken. Yet, being me, the confidence evaporates to more normal levels by midday. Having your muses and some higher beings populate your dreams and offer encouragement has a good thing. I’m certainly not going to kick them out.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time. How about you, writers? Have you seen increased creativity? Maybe it is the eclipse.

Or maybe it’s the coffee.

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Life Poetry

Moving singing walking dancing choking sleeping eating

Thinking breathing hearing feeling seeing

We hunt the rhythm and listen for the chords

Trying to do the things that need done

To keep what we need

Get what we want

And strive for what we hope for

Kisses go unfelt

Words fade unspoken

Skin is left untouched

And dreams wither

But we go on

Because there’s too much time left to stop

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Trust

Alan had a dream. He often corrected himself, calling it a “visitation,” when he shared it with others.

It wasn’t Alan’s first visitation with the dead. Others had come back to tell him something they thought he needed to hear them. The first came when he was seventeen. A dead aunt visited, warning him that his uncle was preparing to pass. Uncle Paul was his favorite, taking Alan on a fishing vacation every summer in an act of empathy that Alan didn’t appreciate for decades. Uncle Paul was so young, just forty-two, when he died of a heart attack while getting an Iron City beer from the frig. A Steeler game was on television. He wasn’t missed for almost a quarter. It was too late by then, back in that era. A snow storm was bruising the city, and the ambulance couldn’t get through.

There’d been other visitations since, but Granny’s visitation was one of the strongest, perhaps because he’d developed a comfort level with them by then. She’d only been dead for ten years, dying in nineteen ninety-six, a month short of one hundred years, yet, there she was, in one of her voluminous blue and white flowered dresses, in his room, accompanied by the smells from talcum powder and coffee. From Alan’s first memory on, she announced, “Let me make a pot of coffee, and we’ll sit awhile,” whenever his family visited her.

Addressing him in a stern but kind voice, she said. “Let Barbara do what she needs to do.”  Not permitting time for a response, she was immediately gone.

On awakening, Alan thanked Granny for the visitation. It took a morning of thought through two large mugs of coffee before he accepted what she was telling him. Though it was probably going to pain him, he’d let Barbara do what she needed to do, whatever the hell that meant. He would just have to trust Barbara.

Really, he was trusting two people, if you think about it, maybe three.

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Today’s Theme Music

This song hit the scene in nineteen eighty-four.

Remember that year, with portends of George Orwell’s prescient novel hanging over us, fueling worries about privacy and government spying? “There are laws against that,” people say, smirking. “It could never happen to us. We’re America. We’re a democracy. It’s the Soviet Union and those totalitarian states like it that should worry.” The U.S.S.R.’s collapse a few years later seemed to vindicate our innate American superiority. We’d won; the communists had lost. Yes, we were so silly to be worried.

Into this era came a German group with a hard-rocking message: “Here I am, rock you like a hurricane.” I didn’t know much about the Scorpions before “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” I knew of them, but little more.

I thought of them today because of my stormy dream. The dream rocked me like a hurricane with its unceasing gloominess and desperation until its climax. I didn’t awaken afraid, but thoughtful. Thinking of the dream, I remembered this song, and its use in Dave Eggers’ novel. Odd, how the mind works, with everything connected and nothing terminated, but spreading and sprawling into new connections.

But with that, I think about the weather again. One difficulty in modeling weather is the planet’s complexity and dynamics. Everything is connected, but tracing the source back to the wings that began the storm can be tricky.

So it is with thinking.

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Adventure Dream

This dream, one of two remembered from last night, was wild.

I was part of an intergalactic crew. We were a small crew. I don’t know anyone’s names in the dream. My commander was a female and not anyone that I recognized.

I seemed to be in a television show. I was younger than I am, and appeared nothing like I ever had, except being white and male, with brown hair. I had the strange powers of being prescient and a great jumper. Both skills were nascent, and I spent large parts of the dream trying to improve both. At one point, I’d developed my jumping sufficiently that I could jump higher than a pub’s wood counter, and hang in the air several seconds, apparently suspending time and gravity. I was still learning about it.

Meanwhile, the series’ story line seemed to be that our little band was trying to help some small creature escape the powers that would capture and experiment on him, and return him to his home planet, across the galaxy. We were constantly being chased. People were trying to ambush and cheat us. We were in several fights.

In one episode memorable to me because my character played a greater role, I noticed that our vessel’s systems were alerting us to being followed. I notified the Captain. Meanwhile, we went planet-side, to a small bar. There, we met with someone to make a deal. I don’t know those details.

I remember that I knew from my prescience that someone was coming for us. So I announced, “I’ll take care of this.” Leaving the group, I went to a front foyer to await our attackers. Cold, heavy rain fell through the darkness outside. I wasn’t a big person. Other men were standing in the foyer. “Are you waiting for a fight, too?” I asked one. He looked down at me and nodded.

The attackers arrived and I gave them a thorough thumping via my special skills. Then, deal done in the bar, we departed the fix, heading for our space vessel and on to our next adventure.

Strange, but true. Well, in my dreams, hey?

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A Dream of Lost Identity

After twenty years in the military, I suppose it’s not surprising that my identity is linked to my time in the ranks. I’ve been retired for more time — twenty-two years — than I served — twenty-one years — so my continuing dreams about identity and being in the military disturb me.

In this latest one, storms were raging. I was the new MFWIC – mo-fo who’s in charge — and was geared up and entering a tense situation. Everyone was waiting for me. But arriving there, I discovered I lacked my military identification card. I knew I’d forgotten it. That embarrassed me. I fumed about the loss without saying anything, but none dared approach me, as all were aware of the situation. All I could so, though, was stew with frustration while waiting to go back and get a new ID.

Returning to the staging location, I didn’t need to say a word. Nobody else did, either. Everyone was waiting for me to get there. As soon as I did, a young female airman in old BDUs wordlessly went about providing me a new ID card. Once she did that, I turned to leave and begin again, more than ready to do so.

And the dream ended.

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Happy One Hundred Fifty-three!

We’ve reached day one hundred fifty-three. Hump day’s pregnant belly is becoming visible over the horizon, that day on which half of this glorious year commonly called twenty seventeen will be completed.

Completed. Done. In the rear-view mirror. Under the bridge. In the books. Finished.

Which will mean, writers, you will have half a year remaining to accomplish those tasks, goals, objectives, and plans you established for yourself somewhere back in the neighborhood of day one.

Think about what you’ve done.

Consider what you want to do for this year, and then put this year in the context of the other years of your life.

How does it look?

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Dreams of Dishes, Numbers and Highways

Dreamed of doing the dishes last night, along with being on a highway and trying to help others find their destination, and having a pair of fours and eights.

In the dishes dream, I was washing fine china in a gray plastic tub. The china had a pretty, delicate pink flower motif on them. The water in the tub was clean, warm and soapy. Filled to the brim, it was outside. There was a bit of crud on the china, so I was using a nylon pad to try to scrub them clean. That wasn’t working, so I went for a walk to find a better solution. While doing that, I eavesdropped on young people around the neighborhood. I became confused when a young woman called her dog, because his name was Michael, which is my name. Why is she calling me? We had a good laugh over it.

The highway dream featured a heavily traveled highway. I was in an open-air car, as most of us were. Small, the cars weren’t important and were barely noticed in the dream. I heard some others talking behind me. Realizing that they sought information on different topics and were lost, I understood that I could help them.

The dream became a little strange, then. Traffic started moving. I pulled off at a split where the congested highway headed into the desert. Traffic stopped behind me. As I hurried to explain to the others where to go, I flipped through scenes of information. None of it was technologically advanced. Some, for example, were flip-charts tied together by twine. Barely held together, the scenes came alive whenever I stopped on one. In this way, I tried to help them to the information they needed. But I was wrong about what they needed. One in particular was searching for information on whittling but I’d presented him with information on something else. I also kept getting distracted by other interesting pieces of information I saw. Then I noticed that the highway traffic was backing up. Knowing it was my fault, I apologized to the others and took off, seguing into the third dream.

In this final remembered dream, I was first shuffling cards, then looking at cards, and then being dealt cards. All I know is that I kept discovering that I had a pair of fours and eights. That same combination kept coming up, red fours and black eights, although I don’t recall the suites.

The dreams are enough to keep me wondering for the rest of the day.

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