Dream a little dream of me...

The past two nights I have had very strange dreams.  Those who know me well know that vivid dreams are nothing new to me.  When I get too warm, I have nightmares about murders, serial killers, and fleeing for my life.  When I am stressed about a new job or upcoming presentation, I usually dream about that.  When I am getting ready to teach a new subject, the lesson plans float around in my head, allowing me to dream but not giving me any restful sleep.  And so with all of these specters, it is unusual for me to wake up surprised or confused by a particular vision.

The night before last, however, was the first of two odd dreams.  I dreamed that my grandmother came to visit and brought her mother with her.  I greeted her and she looked so happy and healthy -- so did great-grandma! -- and she told me that they would be staying for a while.  She then proceeded to tell me about all of their traveling.  It sounded wonderful!  I woke up and was saddened when I realized it was all a dream.  These loved ones have passed away and now are only that healthy and happy in my memory.

Last night was more bizarre.  Let me back up and say that I have never had a dream about giving birth (although I have had dreams about children) and I have no desire for children of my own.  The Teenager, My Baby, and all of My Kids who are now adults and with issues of their own take quite enough time and energy, thank you!  But last night I dreamed that I was sitting on the floor in the bathroom and I (very quickly) gave birth to a beautiful little girl.  I think she was Vietnamese.  Her skin was white and plastic-y and she wasn't breathing; I was so worried that she was dead!  In my dream I called "Wake up, wake up! Please be okay!" as I smacked her rear and tried to clear the mucus from her mouth and nose.  She coughed, sputtered, and then regained her color.  I exhaled a huge sigh of relief and picked her up. 

Now, here is where it gets really strange: she wrapped her tiny baby arms around me and squeezed tightly as she said "I love you! I love you! I love you!"  Of course I told her how much I loved her and then Honey walked into the room, surprised to have missed so much in just a few minutes.

What is that supposed to mean?  Maybe it means nothing, in which case I have no idea what kind of random information my brain was trying to process.  Or maybe some dream interpreters on the internet are right -- it's some new project or aspect of me that I am birthing right now.  Let me tell you, these past few weeks have felt like mental labor pains, so I would believe that interpretation.

I haven't been able to get these dreams out of my head.  Then again, it's only been a day and maybe tonight I'll dream something even more surreal.

Peanut Butter Toast Dreams

I know better than to eat food after 8PM.  Even so, some evenings I don't get a chance to eat dinner until late and I think "Come on, a piece of toast this late isn't a problem -- it's toast!"  There's a still, small voice that says "Don't do it, you know what will happen!" but years of living with and around many children has made it so that I can ignore small voices when I choose.  And so last night I sat down for a dinner of peanut butter toast and a glass of wine. (Dinner of champions!)

Three things affect my dreams: sleeping in a warm house (I always dream of witnessing or trying to escape murders when I'm too warm), eating late at night, and stress.  Any combination of those factors leads to interesting dreams, like last night, for instance.

In my dream, I was in a ramshackle house owned by a friend.  A number of us were there hanging out and doing repairs.  For some reason somehow we got involved in fortune-telling and aura reading and someone predicted that I would have two significant romantic relationships punctuated by danger.  In the dream the psychic said that one would be with this other guy who was also in the house (no clue who this was, since he was 6'7" and I couldn't see his face because I was too short -- nice, dream. Way to go.).  I tried to explain that he was gay so that was impossible, but then the psychic said it had something to do with my shoes (black pumps, which I don't normally use but I wore to a wedding last night and that's probably why they appeared in the dream).  I explained I was already married once and didn't want to do that again, but the psychic said I had no choice.

Somehow, I walked out the back door of a house and found a movie crew setting things up.  It looked like a giant yard sale, but I guess it was a movie.  I said something about keeping the noise down and moving this crap off the property, which made Christian Bale (yes, the actor -- weird) very angry with me.  In my dream he had a temper and decided I offended him and needed to die.  I spent much of the rest of my dream hiding from Christian Bale and his assassins (apparently he had accomplices), both in the ramshackle house and in a nice hotel that was apparently right next to the ramshackle house.

At one point, I went to a woman who practices Kabbalah to ask her about how I could get out of this mess.  (This is probably because I watched Arranged a few nights ago and there is a Kabbalah scene in that movie.)  She did a few things and made a prediction about the danger I was in (and something else, I don't remember what), and then when I turned away (and noticed the former head of my department, Dr. T., sitting there) assassins burst in and killed the Kabbalah woman.  Apparently Dr. T. knew about this but didn't tell me it was going to happen.  I ran to find another hiding spot because I knew Christian Bale was on his way.

Then I woke up.

Weird, eh?  There are people who believe that dreams can have significance.  Personally, I believe that is possible.  But I also believe that sometimes dreams are just a way for the brain to process random information.  What I don't know is why I always dream of murders, why I always have nightmares, when I am too warm.  Sometimes I know to wake myself up, cool down, and then go back to sleep, but when dreams are very intense and plot-driven (as this one somehow was, even though I can't remember most of it), I can't seem to do that.  If I force myself to wake up, I have a headache, and if I fall back to sleep the dream just resumes where it left off, as if my subconscious were a complex DVD player (but one without HD, since I only see some things, like blood, in bright color -- everything else is in color but dull).

Maybe there is significance to all these weird dreams.  I tried to look up some of the things that happened using some random "dream dictionary" I found online, but the "answers" didn't really seem pertinent.

Perhaps it was just another Peanut Butter Toast Dream.

Note to self: Stop eating peanut butter toast late at night.  And find a way to sleep during warm summer months.

In my dreams...

I don't know about other people, but I, for one, am quite addicted to looking at real estate sites and browsing what's on the market.  I don't intend to move, but I like looking at houses and dreaming.  Sometimes those dreams turn into something useful, like when Honey and I decided to move closer to The Big City and I knew exactly what I could find and for how much and what we could sell our first home for: the whole process, from contacting an agent to moving the last box into the new (current) home took fewer than six weeks.  Most of the time, however, I just look and dream and get lost in my own little world for a bit.

My latest dreams have been big, like we-could-only-afford-this-if-we-won-a-huge-lottery big.  Of course in this economy many of the truly crazy-expensive homes have stayed on the market for about five days past forever.  I tell myself that it's because one of these homes knows that it secretly wants to be mine and so it is waiting for that perfect moment where the impossible happens and I suddenly have the $900k or $2.5m or $3.8m and the house and I can spend the rest of our lives together, as we were meant to do.  Honey and I, conveniently, have very similar tastes when it comes to houses, and so I keep hearing the words "Well, win me the lottery and then we'll get that house of yours."  So that is one plan -- I haven't decided if it's Plan A or Plan B.  The other plan is that I will finish this gosh-darn novel (right after the goshier-darnier dissertation), a publishing company will grab it, Oprah will see it and love it, and Hollywood will offer me a movie-rights contract so that they can turn the story into a film starring Zooey Deschanel.  I haven't decided which plan has a greater likelihood of coming true. :-)

Instead of just dreaming and letting all dreams be for naught, I decided that today I would set out to learn what all three of these homes that I love have in common in the hopes that recognized patterns somehow prove useful.  With that intention in mind, I looked and was surprised by what I found.

1. All of the homes have a view.

2. The view can be enjoyed throughout the house, in each house, because all have massive amounts of windows.

This means that even in this dreary climate, there is plenty of natural light inside.

3. All of the homes have beautiful fireplaces.  Each fireplace is an architectural masterpiece, something beautiful and unique and comforting.

4. All have large, gourmet kitchens and beautiful bathrooms.

5. All have unique architecture (although what we like tends to fall into one of two categories: "Northwest" or "early 1970s."  In fact, two of the three homes were built in the same year: 1974).

6. All are on property (ranging from 1.5-54 acres, which is quite the spread, but the point is that they have space).  The property is landscaped and includes a pool. And each of my three "dream homes" has plenty of space to entertain (and by "entertain" I mean "feed large groups of people").

Now I could be grumpy or sad thinking "There's no way I'll ever afford this. Why am I torturing myself?"  Instead, I decided to continue the exercise and apply it to my life by asking the question What does my house have that is similar to my dream homes?

• The house has a beautiful view, which we can see through our many large windows or on our small-ish deck.  

• We have a magnificent stone fireplace.

• The property is spacious, more than a half-acre, and most of it is fenced, which makes Lotus happy.

• I am slowly but surely landscaping sections of the yard. (Side note, just so people don't worry: our pets are completely indoors, but when Hero was alive I'd let her sit outside near the deck when Honey and I were outside. She loved it. And I love this picture because it was taken during her last summer.)

• We have a hot tub. (True, it's been broken since the gigantic freeze two years ago, but it will be fixed eventually, and that's kind of like having a pool.)

• We have something like granite on the counters in the kitchen and bathrooms, and so even though they are teeny-tiny they at least look pretty.
•  The house was built in the early '70s, and while it is a split-level, the exterior has a nice facade that makes it different or unique when compared with all the other split-levels within a few-mile radius.

I love my house.  And it does have most of the things that I adore and look for elsewhere, so this list is a reminder of all of the things that are good right here, right now.  Sure, there are plenty of things that I wish were different -- I'd love a bigger kitchen, or a shower that was more than 2'x2' -- and yes, we've put in hours and hours, weeks upon weeks of work in the nearly four years of owning this home, changing the things that were atrocious when we bought the house and making it more beautiful and livable.  It's a nice home, not pretentious, not perfect, but good for us at this point in our lives. And it is with that reminder swirling around in my head that I can say to Honey, "Don't worry, I love our home, and I am happy to live here for years and years"...at least until we get closer to retirement. By then, maybe the dreams will come true.  :-)

"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand." -- Baruch Spinoza

This is my third day in a row of morning pages -- today I actually wrote in the morning! -- and already I am reawakening my original suspicion about them, developed in 2008, that they really are magical. Of course I do not mean magic as in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but more along the lines of something powerful. There is something to be said for writing one's ramblings and purging one's mind for a few minutes each day. For me, that act allows my brain to look for other entertainment, other thoughts and ideas. Usually, after a few days of pages my novel's plot jumps into focus and I know what happens next, or I have clarity for the direction my week should take, or I have more energy.

Or, like today, I wake up with a vivid dream about something that has been troubling me and I don't know what to do about it. And so I write. I write and write and write, hoping to put that troubling thing aside or find the answer, thinking that there is some mystery buried in the dream, in my subconscious, if only I can reach it.

Since I cannot seem to find the answers for which I am searching, I turn instead to continue my reading in the first chapter of The Artist's Way. This, it seems to me, is a more productive use of time and may, eventually, trick my subconscious into shedding more light on certain subjects. The chapter today seems most fitting because it discusses "core negative beliefs" that block one's creativity as an artist. It discusses using positive affirmations to find and rid one's self of negative beliefs. Cameron suggests picking an affirmation and repeating it to see what happens, so here it goes:

I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
I, MCB, am a brilliant and prolific writer.

Sure enough, my Censor (whom I like to call my Guilt Monster) rears its ugly head as I am writing and says all sorts of terrible things about me and my talent as I am trying to create positive affirmations. No surprise there. Having grown up in a culture where Guilt reigned supreme, I should not be surprised that my Guilt Monster wants to stick around. It's cozy here, warm and welcoming, and what's a homeless Guilt Monster to do? And so I keep him, throw him a bone, and continue blocking my own creativity.

Not any more!  I am sorry, Mr. Monster, but I am afraid that I will have to let you go. I know that this may take some time. You can be cute and furry and comforting and I am used to having you around, but I am afraid that you will have to go. You keep hurting me, and so I am going to build a shield that I can use in my defense until you finally decide to leave. This shield is made out of positive affirmations, just look:

I am creative.
I am a writer.
I am a good, brilliant, prolific, funny writer.
I am allowed to nurture my Artist.
My creative talents are a blessing and a gift and I will use them.

"Undoubtedly, we become what we envisage." -- Claude M. Bristol