Posts Tagged ‘dreams’
Work Dreams
After you retire, if you want to know how to start dreaming about bizarre work challenges again, just drive the commute to your old day job to walk through the workplace and visit all your former coworkers again. I did just that last Tuesday and was rewarded doubly.
I enjoyed the pleasure of seeing their precious faces again, while they applied their trade skills in a spiffed-up facility under new ownership and management. As a bonus, I was rewarded with a mostly unrealistic dream a night later, involving imagined situations I was supposed to play a role in, while having no idea how to proceed.
It was a treat to see them all looking as good as always, and have everyone still remember who I was. Of course, it helped that I brought a batch of Cyndie’s home-baked scones, fresh out of the oven, to distract them from any lingering memories of why they hoped to never have to listen to my lame attempts at humor ever again.
– Lynne, I’m sorry it took barely a few minutes before I came up with some snarky remark to poke fun at you. –
In the years since I retired, I haven’t noticed missing the work, but I frequently miss being with these people. We spend more time interacting with coworkers most weeks of a career than we do with our families. The folks I was lucky to be with for many years were a very special work family for me.
If only I could convince the staff that they should hold their next company picnic at Wintervale Ranch. I’m sure I could talk Cyndie into baking some desserts for the occasion. I would even promise not to make the manure composting area one of the main features I’d show off.
After a day up at the Wilkus’ cabin in the middle of the week, Cyndie and I have taken advantage of an opportunity to get away to her family’s lake place for the weekend. We brought Asher along, too, so we only needed to find coverage for twice-a-day horse feeding for the few days.
Since we prefer to wake up at the lake whenever possible, we drove up last night under the cover of darkness. I think it might have helped me avoid any more dreams about the old workplace.
When can I expect to start having dreams about weird situations of being retired?
.
.
Wet Mowing
Wetness abounds this morning. After a first round of mowing yesterday, I parked the rider, put the batteries on their chargers, and went in for some lunch. A peek at the weather radar revealed I had limited time to make much more progress on mowing. While the tractor batteries charged, I grabbed the push mower and hustled down to the labyrinth.
I was maybe 4/5s of the way through when the droplets started sprinkling down. I finished anyway, hoping that the electric mower wouldn’t be hypersensitive to working in the rain. The shower was of short duration but long enough to make it too wet to do any more mowing.
Cyndie put a rain cover on Mia because the last time it rained, the old mare shivered significantly when she got wet. This time, it wasn’t as cool or windy, but Cyndie chose a little extra caution, just in case.
I didn’t think it was necessary, but soon after, another round of precipitation arrived and soaked things even more, and my thinking changed. It’s a good thing Cyndie’s intuition is so keen.
As we emerged from the woods this morning on our rounds, it was hard to tell whether the moisture droplets on the horizon were steam rising up from the heat of the rising sun or fog settling down toward the ground.
Water droplets were clinging to new spider webs, accenting the mastery of the intricacies of the structures.
Just a couple of steps in the yard had our boots soaking wet. Hopefully, the declining angle of September sunshine won’t delay the drying of grass blades too long. I have plenty of mowing left to do and dwindling days to accomplish it all. We need to leave somewhere around zero-dark-thirty Tuesday morning to meet Mike and Barb for a ride to the airport to catch a flight to Boston. Today and tomorrow are all I’ve got left to finish another week’s worth of groundskeeping tasks.
It seems like travel adventures with the Wilkuses in September are becoming an annual event. Last year at this time, we were all headed to Iceland together. Much earlier this morning, I was dreaming we were already underway and driving to a destination that took the car around a corner too fast while Cyndie and Mike were somehow joint-driving in classic reality-defying dream logic.
I felt myself clinching in preparation for a crash as the car rounded a corner on only two wheels, with the rest of the car hanging in mid air over a dropoff. Thank goodness the gravity in dream-world didn’t pull us down.
It’s not like I have any lingering subconscious aversion to traveling or anything…
.
.
Dream Driven
I haven’t got a clue. I’m feeling a little shaky about trusting my intuition after the dream I experienced last night. It was classic in how real it seemed compared to how obviously unreal it proved to be upon my waking. The way it mixed time and locations should have helped my sleeping mind to recognize it was a fabrication.
It has left me wondering if I will be savvy enough to sense when I am reading a message from a Russian bot or a genuine American citizen with a hairbrained opinion lacking any factual basis. If the President of the United States looks like he is buddying up with Putin, can anything healthy possibly result from it?
My dream had nothing to do with world politics. It involved someone with whom I am close. It involved death.
What is up with that? I’m not sure. I don’t want to delve into it.
Nothing to see here. Carry on.
I spent a little time shaping my latest wood piece yesterday while sitting on the shore of the lake, listening to the sound of the water lapping against the sand.
It is a cutting from the Y of two branches of the oak tree section that crashed to the ground in front of our eyes on an otherwise calm morning. We don’t know why it fell at that time. It was the kind of thing that could have happened in a dream.
As is often my style, I am leaving the bark on one side of my sculpture. I try to come up with words to explain the symbolism I assign to this, but I’m not entirely sure it isn’t just a way to get out of needing to finish all the surface area. Although, a smooth side and a rough side can be a pretty easy metaphor for a lot of things/people/situations.
Meanwhile, I hear the fearful leader has called out our military to control D.C. Talk about a disconnect between some people’s dreams and reality.
The delirium of this kind of thing happening in our country is a travesty. No wonder I find myself drawn to intense focus on precisely shaping a heart out of the solid wood of an old oak tree, bringing out the splendor of the beautiful woodgrain.
The symbol of a classic heart shape is a universal representation of love, and genuine love is the only thing that will get us out of any mess the world is in. When enough people of influence get around to fully embracing that, we might see that our best dreams can actually come true.
My dream last night has me wanting to soak up as much of my immediate reality as possible today. Maybe even hug the ones I love. Retune the vibrations of my intuition. Hold a heart-shaped piece of an oak tree and feel its strength and the love it symbolizes.
It’s our last full day at the lake this weekend. We drive home tomorrow morning.
.
Sleep Deprivation
All day long the rain came down. Every so often there were rumbles of thunder. Periodically, downpours would roar or big winds blew. If I didn’t speak, those were the predominant sounds beyond the energized reporting of Olympic sports commentators droning from the TV. I’m home alone with the animals for a few days.
If I didn’t have the Olympic broadcasts keeping me company, I’d probably do a lot more talking to myself. Asher isn’t much of a conversationalist.
I’m feeling rather short of words lately. Hanging out with Asher and the horses doesn’t require me to talk much. One might think that would result in more mental resources for writing but I’m not finding that to be the case right now.
It would be nice if that mental blankness would allow me to sleep soundly but Sunday night’s dream saga of me striving to achieve something that continuously eluded success and appeared to consume way more time than was available was unsettling. I would slide toward consciousness from the dream and lament that it felt like I was mentally working so hard, then fall back to sleep and into more of the same type of dream. It became exhausting when I was supposed to be resting.
One thing that the annoying overnight dream-disturbed sleep made easier was falling into naps all day yesterday, even when I didn’t intend to. Since Asher wasn’t feeling at all like napping, his whining was able to disrupt any serious sleep recovery a reasonable nap would have provided. With nothing but falling rain happening outside, it would have been a great day to nap.
Instead, I found myself getting soaked while giving Asher chances to stop whining on walks in the rain.
I sure am glad the horses don’t need me to take them for walks.
Let’s hear it for the rejuvinating benefits of a sound night’s sleep with nothing but sweet dreams throughout.
.
.
Sleeping Well
It’s one of those days. I can’t help it. When nothing specific has happened, it’s as if nothing but dreams start bubbling up in my head and flowing out of my fingers onto the keyboard. I suppose it doesn’t help that I gave in to an urge to rewatch the insane Steven Conrad dark-comedy-spy-drama series, “Patriot” last night. A lot of this series is like a bad dream.
Rewatching a much-loved television series is like visiting with old friends you haven’t seen in a long while. It’s why we returned to the beginning of “Reservation Dogs” after finishing the last season. We missed all the characters.
I’m wondering if the spy movie, “Argylle” might have triggered my memories of the “Patriot” series. I understand these shows aren’t for everyone, and I don’t know what my appreciation for them says about me beyond my comfort with dark humor, but they seem to ring some pleasure bells in my head.
Yesterday, I allowed myself to fade into a mid-day slumber in the recliner and dreamed I was floating with a life vest in some water and trying to answer a question Cyndie had asked me from her seat in a low-riding boat. As I attempted to answer I found myself sinking below the surface and I couldn’t do anything about it. My eyes wouldn’t open and my hands and feet wouldn’t move.
I thought to myself, “If I could just open my eyes…” but I couldn’t because I was sleeping at the time. And that is what woke me. My ‘dream self’ began to recognize that my ‘real self’ was asleep. I find moments of lucidity in dreams to be a gift.
Sleeping well enough to enjoy my dreams is also a gift. I do not take for granted my good fortune of having cultivated good sleep habits. I owe a lot of my sleeping success to the information I learned in Matthew Walker’s book, “Why We Sleep – Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.” I highly recommend it!
Since good sleep is one of the more important aspects of optimal health, it is something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. There is a positive feedback loop in that good health allows for good sleep and getting good sleep is high up on the list of healthy things we can do for ourselves.
If you are out of sync, for either health or sleep, I don’t know if one is solvable before the other. Which comes first?
Don’t bother pondering the question. We can’t lose if we set our sights on striving for both at the same time!
.
.
Powerful Hug
It was in a dream, but not all dreams are equal. It was a physical hug that my brain perceived as a more tactile reality than any dream I’d ever experienced. Sometimes, dreams feel so real that waking from them results in a confusing reconciliation of the conscious world from the dream world.
“Did that just happen?”
“Where am I? What day is it?”
It was the kind of dream where my next reaction was that I needed to talk about it as soon as possible before it was gone; before I couldn’t remember it anymore.
Shouting, “Cyndie!?”
My first perception was that it started with my seeing a photograph of a youngster and older siblings sitting on the railing outside the back door of our Cedar Ridge Road house in Eden Prairie where my family lived in the 1970s. That was a railing that would not have actually supported us in the way depicted in this dreamed photograph.
I strained to clarify whether the kid was me or my little brother. The kid had just been given a fresh haircut and it appeared to be a bizarre customization of a mohawk. The front hairline –multiple steps of a hairline, actually– (how dream-typically unreal) was visible where it had been buzzed like a sheered sheep.
When trying to intensify my observance of the kids’ face, it morphed to defy clarification, so I decided it was my brother since I don’t recall ever getting a haircut like that one.
I looked up from the photo to pass it around to my siblings in the room, hoping someone else would be able to provide clarity and found myself looking into the face of my sister, Linda, who I haven’t seen in real life since she died back in 1997. What a shock!
Reaching out in disbelief, I touched her and found she was actually there and discovering that, embraced her in a bearhug of a hug, crying emotionally over the experience of having her in my arms once again.
In my real life of late, I am not aware of any particular triggers that would have refreshed memories of Linda in my mind, so this visit felt extremely out of the blue.
As amazing as that part of the dream was, it became additionally intriguing with the following.
After that powerful hug, the “dream me” moved into another room to process the experience and in that space, two figures moved past me to walk through a door to outside the house. It was Cyndie’s deceased father, Fred, and a young version of her living brother, Steve.
As he passed by me, I told Fred that I had just experienced being able to physically hug my dead sister, Linda, and he acknowledged my words with something of a knowing smirk as he continued on out the door. In my thoughts, I marveled that he knew exactly what was going on, while I was grappling with the unbelievable amazement I was experiencing.
That hug was a powerful and priceless experience with a loved one who has passed away.
The whole dream was almost too deep for me to decipher. It started in my unconscious and, beyond sharing it here, I am happy to let it continue to simmer and steep in my unconscious for me to absorb with time.
Feeling a lot of love this morning for loved ones who have passed during my lifetime.
.
.
Dream Visit
It’s a mystery to me, one which I believe equally that either of two possibilities could be true. When a deceased person makes an appearance in my dreams while I am sleeping, is it because my mind conjured up the occurrence or because the spiritual nature of the passed soul placed themselves into the perceptions going on in my mind?
On Wednesday night, or actually, in the wee early hours of Thursday morning, I was having a series of fantastical dreams. At one point, I found myself seated in a booth common to many eateries, with Cyndie beside me and her mother across from me, and then Cyndie’s dad, Fred, showed up, sitting on the corner opposite from me.
It is the first time I have dreamed of Fred since he died in June.
I was shocked to see him, and incredibly thrilled. He seemed to acknowledge my reactions, flashing an impish grin as I scanned Cyndie and her mom who remained oblivious. I was so moved with his presence, the rush of emotions made me want to cry.
It being a dream, and my body essentially paralyzed, I couldn’t get myself to act on the urge.
My question lingers; did my mind choose to create this scenario of Fred’s spirit appearing in my dream or did his supernatural essence actually show up to connect with me?
Either way, it brought me a lot of joy in the moment, joy that lasted all day long and expanded each time I described it to people.
Of course, the best was when I had a chance to tell Cyndie about it.
While he was seated, he took a swig from what appeared to be a beer bottle. He looked really happy to me. The thought occurred to me that he could probably have a beer if he wanted in his afterlife. Fred had been sober about as long as Cyndie and I have been married. He drank a lot of non-alcoholic beers, but I don’t recall him ever looking as happy about it as he looked when tipping that bottle in my dream.
Did my brain conjure all that up? Maybe. Since I don’t really know, I’m happy just relishing the great feeling the dream provided.
It did nudge up the emotions of missing him a bit more than before, but the fun of seeing him again, and his looking so perfectly happy and mischievous was worth it.
Missing Fred is something that a lot of us are adjusting to and will linger long. If we could meet him in our dreams at will, I suspect it would happen more often than it does.
Maybe that lends a little credence to the possibility that appearances of lost loved ones in our dreams is more their doing than our own.
.
.
Stinky Year
Look at it this way, today it is the fifteenth day of July, so we are halfway through the month that comes after the midpoint of the year 2020. All this whining about 2020 being so problematic will be over before you know it. We can stop wondering about what the next calamity could possibly be and start marveling over how we got this far without throwing in the towel.
Unless you happen to have school-age children, that is, and have no idea how to cope with more distance learning in the fall. Or if you got sick with the coronavirus. Or you are out of work due to the pandemic. Or lost your medical insurance because you no longer have a job. Or you can’t pay your bills because you didn’t qualify for financial assistance.
In the wee hours before waking yesterday, I experienced the most vivid dream where I found myself in the midst of my high school classmates in something of a reunion gathering. I am curious about what threw my mind into that reconnection with my school days. In classic dream fashion, by daylight, I lost the gist of what I was thinking and feeling about the situation while the dream was underway, but was left with the vague pleasure of having been among peers I haven’t seen lately.
Maybe it’s a mental defense mechanism for escaping the shelter-in-place mindset of the pandemic.
Cyndie has been up at the lake for the last two days and she took Delilah with her. It has been refreshingly calm at home on my own after the day-job. The cat and the chickens don’t ask for much from me, so it has felt like a little vacation.
Of course, the pesky wildlife hasn’t taken any time off. For two nights in a row, I found our kitchen compost bin had been abused and separate access panels forced open so they could ravage the rotting goods. Last night, I wrapped it with a ratcheted tie-down strap to secure the doors from opening.
Let’s see the little raccoon claws loosen a ratchet mechanism.
Yesterday morning on the drive to work, a young-looking fox trotted across the road just around the corner from our property. Luckily for us, that enemy-of-hens was headed in the direction of a neighboring property where egg-layers roam freely.
Later, as my car approached a fresh road-kill, I centered my tires to miss the mess and held my breath. Before I even started to resume breathing, I felt the acrid fumes in my nostrils. I was afraid to inhale, but I had to.
Fresh skunk. Reeeally fresh. Ow.
At least 2020 is over halfway to the history books. The whole year seems to have a general stink to it.
.
.
Bad Dreams
I reached for something that wasn’t really there and despite the nonchalant attempt at pretending I meant to do that, it was obvious to anyone looking that something awkward was going on. It’s hard to fake being in control when there isn’t control to be had. When the brain snaps to attention and static is the only result, it’s hard not to suspect the worst.
When limbs won’t move and words won’t form, I think something deep within us begins to recognize a dream is underway and nudges consciousness toward the surface.
How can sleep be restful when a spectacular theatrical extravaganza is going on in a mind and driving the heart to pound like a hammer?
How can sanity be maintained when virus-mania is boiling over from every reporting entity at a-mile-a-minute?
Thankfully, I can happily report that there have been no positive COVID-19 test results for anyone at Wintervale up to this point. Of course, take that news with a grain of salt because no one here has been tested, either.
In that same vein, we will not be attending any NBA games, but we had no plan to do so, regardless. I will miss watching the excitement of the men’s NCAA March Madness basketball tournament this year, but I’m happy that sports businesses have joined the growing movement to postpone or cancel events that involve stadiums, or theaters, or classrooms full of people.
There are going to be a lot of folks out of work at the same time that the financial machine is melting down and my feeble mind is at a loss as to how this is all going to play out.
I have a feeling that not being able to watch spectator sports is going to become the least of our worries.
There will be unprecedented opportunities to practice the art of beaming love into the world in proportions greater than any suffering this latest pandemic might dish out.
May we all rise to the occasion.
Oh, and wash your hands out there.
.
.
Relative Something 