"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.

"Silence"

There's a sliver of time when night is over, but it isn't morning.  The plants are weighed down by dew and the wind is still.  The bats and frogs have eaten all the mosquitoes, the crickets and frogs have found their mates, and the night animals bed down for the day while the day animals still sleep.  Silence.

I like the in between times.  When evening starts, or before morning, or the twilight between waking and sleeping, or sleeping and waking.  Those are the slices of time for feeling instead of thinking.  When fairies are possible and our wishes are realities.  When we're alone with ourselves to feel the things that we really want instead of what the world wants us to want.

These can be the times of epiphanies.  We can remember our dreams, and our dreams make sense, before the day takes away our certainties.  All things are possible.

Those of you people who pop out of bed first thing in the morning, and start the coffee, check your emails, wash your windows, or whatever it is you do with the full energy of a night's rest are missing one of the best times of the day when you could be snuggling your partner or feeling the truth of your dreams.

Morning people are self-righteous about how they get the day going and how the rest of us are lazy slugs.  It's no wonder I've wanted to throttle some of them.  I almost came to physical violence when my college roommate threw open the windows in the middle of winter to air the place out.  I think it counts as justifiable homicide when my peaceful slumbers are disturbed by snow falling on my face.

Some people hate silence, and fill it with music, and activity, and chatter.  Maybe I'm the only one who enjoys it when the power goes out.  The refrigerator stops humming, and other stuff I've learned to tune out shuts off too.  It's so quiet.  Peaceful.  Healing.

I used to lay in bed and feel the wonder of my body.  Red blood cells going one way, white blood cells going another, the thump of my heart pushing them along, my breath pulling in oxygen... breathe in healing, breathe out stress...

And then the day starts.  The dog needs out and her bowls filled.  There's stuff to do, people to see, problems to solve.  Bosses are too often extraverted morning people who think everybody else should be just like them.  People who open windows in winter, and to hell with whoever isn't keeping up with their program.

It takes all types.  The world needs the dreamers, and this dreamer needs to sleep in the silence just before morning.