Themes in Dreams

I'm sure you know by now that I have extra-ordinary dreams, life like and even sometimes continuations of dreams that I've had days, weeks or even months before.  It's like I live a different life when I'm dreaming, sometimes hoping that the dream world is real and this day-to-day grind is a nightmare I keep falling into.  What I like most about dreaming is being able to jump into the air and fly.  Flying has got to be my absolute favorite dream element.  It's supposed to mean you are happy.  Needless to say, I haven't had one in a long, long while because of the stress of the waking world.  One theme that has always been with me for as long as I can remember is having to have to go home after being away and having to have to pack all my belonging back up and get them on the plane/car/train home again.  But there is just too much stuff.  I bring volumes of books, my bird, all my make-up even though I only wear it in real life for a special occasion or when I'm going to get my picture taken.  The stress of finding a way to get it all back home again is often more than I can deal with and I'm stymied to do anything at all.  Last night, I'm happy to report that I was able to get everything home, even Sammy (my parrot) I secured in a zipped compartment on my carry on. 
This is what it means according to www.dreammoods.com

To dream that you are packing, signifies big changes ahead for you. You are putting past issues to rest or past relationships behind you. Alternatively, it represents the burdens that you carry.

To dream that you are packing, unpacking and packing and unpacking again, represents chaos in your life. You are feeling overwhelmed with the various things you are juggling in your life. You are carrying around too many burdens and need to let go. Consider what unfinished business you have to tend to. Try to resolve these issues so they can finally be put to rest.

My interpretation of the interpretation is since I'm packing to go home, and constantly packing and unpacking to repack to make more room for what I need to bring home would be that I've been away from my self too long and caught up in the chaos that is my life.  Home for me is writing, which was brought home with accuracy last year when I was doing National Novel Writing Month and I completed a novel in 30 days (actually more like 26).  Home for me is creating stories and blogging and doing projects that help me think in different angels and direction I never would have before.  That is home for me.  In my dreams I'm very covetous over my books, my writing items and, of course, Sammy.  I think it's telling me that I need to shed, both physically and emotionally, the things that really aren't that important to me getting back home.  Getting home, being a full time fiction writer, is the goal, not to tote all my excess baggage around with me until I'm too exhausted to do anything I deem of worth.

Yes, that is a picture of my parrot Sammy.  She's doing her "Pretty Girl" trick.

Future Dreaming or Nightmare...You tell me...

So, in the dream Hollywood controlled the world, all movies are interactive, instead of eating food we ate the chemicals they are preserved in, AND there is a resistance group to keep some basic moral boundaries in the government.  So, nightmare or what?

Don't say reality, because the dream was scary enough.

The Dreamer and the Dream

Had one humdinger of a dream last night. It haunted me most of the morning until I realized what it meant. To start with, I went to bed dizzy. Not the my-feet-aren't-completely-on-the-floor kind of loosing balance but the effect when you turn your head and the vitreous fluid that surrounds the lobes continues to flow in direction of the turn. If I sit still I'm fine.

The dream had me at an event where there were different games and I was winning (which I never do), but I kept on thinking I needed to feed the dogs. I don't have dogs in the waking world, and essentially these weren't my dogs in the dream either, I was just responsible for them. I always made a point of feeding Sammy (my beastly bird) first thing in the morning, and I remembered in the dream that I did that. Days were quick in the dream, and each day I would remind myself to feed the dogs. Even wondering at one point if they were even still alive considering how long it had been since I fed them.

The final game happened and I tied for first. It was this game where I had to roll a bocce sized ball on a U-shaped track with my left hand, catch it with my right and then shoot it over to my left and send it on the track again. The one who make the loop the most wins that bout. I was able to do it fifteen times before time was called, the guy I was competing with did the same. I wanted the big plastic bag of sea shells and plastic dinnerware and I gave him the trophy, it wasn't that important to me.

I found my family on the beach, walking with the two girls that were refereeing the game, they were heading in the same direction. They were doing this for college credit and were amazed that I wasn't a college student too, as if only college kids could play games or were supposed to play games, I don't know. We talked about the dogs and I realized, again, I hadn't fed them.

With the magic of dreams I was at the house I grew up in, the one place that I still think of as home, and I saw the dogs. One was my sisters deceased 16 year old Australian cattle dog and then my nephews Peke named Gratch. Though I recognized Gratch as Gratch it didn't look like his dog. It was completely shaved, including the mohawk, bigger and more brown than cream as his little pooch was and completely emaciated. Shaunzie, Sandy's dog wasn't as bad off. Joey was there, feeding Gratch, rubbing salt in my already wounded heart for neglecting these little animals. Not mean, but well intended berating of sorts. Gratch filled out after one bowl of table scraps and dog food, while Shaunzie really didn't need anything. Neither of the dogs wanted anything to do with me.

It startled me, because, even though I've been a neglectful pet owner in the past (like decades in the past when I was still a kid) I would never do anything like that, consciously starve an animal until I could see their ribs. I've had tug-o-minds with a dog that refused to eat cheap dog food, but I always made sure he ate. (he won by the way, he got the good stuff in the end. Cheeky beast.) That's why it stuck with me so long today, the neglect, the absent mindedness, it's just so not me these days when it comes to living creatures and humans.

Then it dawned on me....

The dogs aren't dogs, they are my creative projects. Clarissa Pinkola Estes talked about dreams in her "Women Who Run With Wolves" book. It's an excellent read if anyone is looking for a chance to see themselves differently and to get a little more comfortable in their own creative skin. Shaunzie represents the book that's finished. It could use a little more work on the end, but I'll wait for an editor to help me through it. It ended where it ended, and that's normally where I make my end, whether it makes sense or not. The starving, smaller one is Gratch. The work in progress. The characters haven't spoken to me in a long time, not since I wrote Purple People Eater and it's like they are always in the back of my mind that they need to be fed, but I never feed them because they won't have anything to do with me. I guess my subconscious is tired of having to do all the character-husbandry and wants me to kick in again and get back to the keyboard and edit the monster down to a more comfortable book. To put it on par with the dream, editing down to me is like wandering through a yard with a shovel to pick up the piles left behind by dogs. It's hard, smelly, dirty work. But it's got to get done. That's not saying my story is poo, I personally enjoy the characters when they fat and happily fed, it's just the work of weeding out the verbose from the sublime. 

I guess it's time to let the dogs out......

Of Two Minds

This mornings dream was a doozie. Okay, a doozie by my standards. I say that because I said something in my dream that confounded me a bit. (Confound, in this case means, confused and yet still profound...I don't know what it really means). I was trying to explain why I was having problems doing something. My reply was "The minds can do that to the body." I've been a big believer that the mind is in control of the body, that if the mind is sick the body is sick too. But mindS? We're talking plural here. There's the statement of being of two minds on one matter, but to have two minds ruling the body seems rather extreme.

But could it be a temporal and eternal mind? Could it be a physical and spiritual mind? Both the yin and yang working in tandem to rule the body. Our body doesn't choose to succumb to temptation, but our body normally does the deed. In that case you have to have a consensus of the physical and spiritual minds to allow the body to step into a temptation. A physical temptation that is. Mental temptations are few and far between, but they do happen. So, are our minds always at work, the ephemeral working on the physical, to establish dominance over the other? It's not like the body really has a chance over the brain. I know a lot of people feel that the body has a will and a mind of it's own because sometimes you just can't "help" yourself, and this is a conversation that is brought up between me and other friends about the baser temptations in life. They argue that once you've engaged the body you can't stop it, you have to give in. My argument is Bull S**t! It's not easy but you don't have to completely succumb to temptation EVER just because it feels too good to stop. That's like saying you can't quit smoking because you're just too addicted to it and it feels like you're going to die if you don't have a smoke. The truth of the matter is, you're going to die if you don't stop smoking. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm not saying it's painless, I am saying that it can be done and the mind can overrule the body's urges.

I guess you can say we are a walking evolutionary paradox. The body, left on it's own will hunt, will mate and will function without meaning. No better or worse for ware than the wolves of the wild that stay in intimate family groups both for protection and for companionship. Our physical mind is what pushes the body to find something higher, to establish and assign meaning to the every day mundane tasks of hunting, eating and building a home. The spiritual mind is the epitome of the three as it provides and eternal compass to the physical mind. We do what we do because of what we want to do in eternity.