"Dream"

I keep a folder for dreams, not every day dreams, but the ones waking me up at 2:15 in the morning.  Of course they aren't always at 2:15, but a surprising amount of them are at that time.  I take notice when one of them comes because my subconscious is trying to tell something my conscious brain rejects or can't see.

I recently heard the best description I've heard yet to describe intuition.  Our conscious mind is slow compared to our subconscious brain.  Think of it like a computer.  Our conscious brain only uses the data and programs it needs to get something done.  Our subconscious is everything on our hard drive.  It's all our programming and everything we've ever experienced.

Say you meet someone new and you mistrust him immediately.  You don't consciously know why you don't like him, but you feel it in your belly he's a snake.  Your subconscious knows why you don't like him, but it's too hard to tell your waking mind all of the reasons why you should avoid this guy.  In an ideal world we'd just thank our subconscious for remembering all the warning signs and repeat the adage to always trust your intuition.

Sometimes I argue with my intuition.  Maybe everyone else likes this new guy.  Maybe I've been burned too many times?  Maybe I should listen to all those people who tell me to be more open and trusting?  Ten years later I might be kicking myself at the memory of how my intuition told me not to trust the guy.

But sometimes I get those 2:15 a.m. dreams that kick me in the head about something.  Then I'm more likely to trust my gut because whether I can explain it rationally or not, those dreams tell me something I need to know.  Of course sometimes apocalyptic dreams of tornadoes may not get me to really understand the coming storm is Tony, but the dream will definitely get my attention and make me think about things.

I'd rather have flying dreams.  They're just fun, but I'm grateful for the tornado dreams too.

Unrelated to dreams, I was frankly avoiding my dogless house one day and went to Goodwill where I bought wallpaper for my bathroom.  The walls in that room aren't the best and wallpaper covers a million sins.  The old paper was pretty tired looking and I figured I needed a project to keep my mind off things.

Stripping off the old paper went pretty well, but the new paper was miserable to put on.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Goodwill, it's a second-hand store that sells things cheap.  Sometimes you get what you pay for.  As I balanced precariously on the side of my tub and strained to reach the corners by the ceiling I decided I'm definitely getting too old for this kind of thing.  I think I'll live with this wallpaper forever.  Thankfully, I'm starting to love it.

Then, I decided to show off the new paper and decided to take a picture.  Well, but the grout looked kind of bad now that the walls looked pretty.  I spent a lot of time peroxiding the grout for your benefit.  You'll notice there's a lot of grout between all those tiles, but I figure this is the only time I'll be taking a picture of my bathroom :)

Next time I complain about plumbing you'll understand why.
This bathroom is really, really vintage.

"Sleep"

I had a dream when I was a kid.  I climbed a tree and turned into a hawk.  I looked out at the world from that high place and felt free.  I started flying, and another hawk joined me.  We spent a perfect summer day flying together and I loved him.  Eventually we went back to my tree but I didn't want to wake up or for him to go away.  He promised he'd find me when we grew up.  That dream gave me hope for a long time.

Flying dreams are the best, though I had a different kind of flying dream when I was married.  I was flying around with a friend and my husband wanted to join us.  I told him it's easy, come join us.  He kept jumping and trying but couldn't do it.  I suppose my subconscious was telling me he wasn't my hawk lover and the marriage wasn't right, but at the same time I felt so much joy in the flying.  Was my subconscious telling me to be true to my nature and find my own kind?

I value the information in dreams.  I wasn't ready to get divorced, but the message stayed with me.  I felt the inevitability of where the marriage was going.

Sometimes I wake up and write my dreams down.  Once, I got a pencil and paper and fell face first into my pillow, writing the dream left-handed in the dark as I fell asleep again.  That made for interesting reading in the morning, especially since I wrote several lines over each other.

...side trip into my dream folder.  I'm not sure what to make of "Chocolate fish hand.  Kind of pathetic, but sweet too."  Where did that come from?  My waking mind doesn't think stuff like this.  I don't think I'm creative enough awake to come up with a chocolate fish hand, but I think dreams exist to help us.  They give us a different way to look at things that we shove out of our day thoughts.

People long gone still haunt my dreams and effect my waking life.  I had a moment like that this week when people were talking about an 11 year old girl killing a baby.  That's horrible, and I remembered Vaughn.  He was a horrible boy who regularly threatened to kill me, kill my family, kill my dog and make me watch.  He left dead animals in my yard to emphasize the threats.

Vaughn has been in my dreams all my life even though he drove his car into a tree and died years ago.  When I have a Vaughn dream I know the fears I'm facing in the present are visceral, important.  The fear and rage I feel, but keep tightly clenched inside, hurts me.  Dreams provide the lesson that I have the power to do something about it.

We all have this -- the power to recognize our issues in our dreams, the power to face it, the strength to come up with solutions.  Our dreams are the product of our own minds.  We don't have to explain them to anyone else.  It is the most private of all aspects of our ourselves.  They are our joys and our fears.  They are us at the most essential level -- even if it's a chocolate fish hand, but mostly I like flying.

This eagle is ancient history.  I did it for a printer who wanted to show customers thermography, a heat process which makes a special powder turn into a glossy, embossed surface.  It's usually used on business cards.  This was printed as regular 4-color process, but the dark brown and white were added on top in thermography.  Even though I did this for a job, I think it's also a good example of how to get printed samples of your work.  Talk to a printer and maybe you can both end up with a sample to show potential customers.