Food Cravings During Pregnancy (Silliness)

Pregnancy: a time when my body had a very strong-willed mind of its own, a time when I was blindly obedient to the commands of my food cravings. Not satiating a food craving was punishable by nausea. Nausea was a state that I spent my pregnancies desperately trying to avoid.

I wonder what those intense food cravings meant and if I interpreted the signals correctly. I bet that something got lost in transit.

Imagine The Depleted Vitamin Store in The Pregnant Body weakly reaching out to The Brain and pleading, “We are low on Vitamin C up in here. Can you send a shout-out?”

The Brain sends the most obvious signs so that Rebecca can get what she needs, “Hey, Body, we need some ascorbic acid. You are officially craving something fruity, citrusy, sweet, and sour. Oh, and, we need it now, or else!”

The Mind: “Or else what?”

Rebecca gags a little.

The Mind is repentant and immediately goes to work decoding the messages with all the mystery and precision of John Edward...

Rebecca to hubby: “I want gummy bears.”

Hubby to Rebecca: “It’s after midnight and we live 20 miles outside of city limits.”

The Brain and The weak Depleted Vitamin Store exchange confused looks.

Depleted Vitamin Store: “What? Rebecca, no, try harder.”

The Brain clarifies, “Stop thinking SUGAR!”

Rebecca to hubby: “I need SOUR gummy bears! NOW!”

Depleted Vitamin Store to The Brain: “Tell her to think more along the lines of citrus. Oh! Oh! I got it! Tell her to think NATURAL.”

From Rebecca’s little mental scrap-book The Brain selects a stunning image of an orange grove to convey the point.

Rebecca to hubby: “I neeeeeeeed O R G A N I C sour gummy bears!”





That was silly, but I imagine that THAT is how it all goes down.

Dream (planes, panic, cruel boss)

I pull back the covering of a very large swimming pool. Leaves are floating on the surface, though no trees are around. In the distance, I hear airplanes. There are two planes and because I am not there to watch them land, my “boss” yells at me, “I told you that when I land, you are to be there waiting!” He says this over an intercom system so his words are loud, though he is a tiny speck in the distance. He is standing on a metal structure. He is angry.

***

I’m inside preparing and serving frothy cappuccino. The froth is overflowing the silver cylinder and I'm scooping it with a soup ladle. People are enjoying their coffee. I think of monks, cappuccino, and ivory soap. It's the "air." I hear the sirens and I know that the planes are coming in to land again. I panic because I know that I am supposed to be there. I am going to be in so much trouble. I am too far away. I won’t get there in time. So much fear.

I miss my boss’s plane, but a second plane lands and crashes. For some reason it is my fault. I’m in a lot of trouble so I go to investigate the damage. On my way, I walk through wreckage. I come up to an empty helmet ... it's all my fault ... and then a body – whole – unscathed. His eyes are closed. I walk around him, he is wearing light jeans and a light gray shirt. ...his eyes open. It’s ____ who is referred to as "the husband" later in the dream.

I’m *severely* punished for this.

***

We are at my D-mom’s house in San Antonio. (My favorite place to be as a child.) I am showing a group of people her house. “This is where I used to hide and pretend that Darth Vader was looking for me. And this is where I always dream that there are stairs and as you can see, it’s just a wall.”

I hear the planes outside. This causes panic, but for a different reason. We are at war and when people are found, they are killed, so I tell everyone in the house to hide in the attic. I take a gallon of water with me because I don’t know how long we will be hiding.

***

We are at a little college, small like a community college, but bustling with student activity: people playing football and studying in groups along and around the outside of the building.

We are inside of the building. Hubby and I are going up the stairs and hubby grabs me by my shoulders and turns me around, “It’s the husband.” He won’t let me see him. He's protecting me from him and we are leaving quickly.

***

I go into a room and “the husband” is there. He is tied to a chair and someone (like a mob boss) is going to kill him. “You realize that he gave a woman $100.00 for her night gown?” The mob-boss throws a white gown at me. I have compassion on “the husband” and I’m told to leave or they will kill me too.

The next room contains all of my school books. I have to leave them behind. I had doodled much in one of the notebooks and it is open. I had written the letters “ABE” in cursive down one side of the page. I'm looking at the letters, wondering what "abe" means. For some reason this doodling is incriminating, but I don’t have time to close the book or take my stuff with me.

Dream (spinning room, orange and white)

Yesterday, I decided to take a little nap.

I was dreaming that I was standing in the middle of a circular room. Instead of windows, the perimeter of the room contained door after door. The room and the doors were spinning around me. I could look into each door for only a split second. Each door led to a room filled with information that I felt I needed to know more about. I couldn’t get to the rooms. Not only were people (unintentionally) blocking the entrances, but I couldn’t see around the people and the room was spinning too fast around me. One of the doors contained people and information made up of orange and white. I was frustrated, but the people were happy and weren’t aware that they were blocking my view. Crazy dream - spinning.

I don’t know what happened first, me waking up or the buzz of the dryer startling me. My dream seemed to last about a minute. Could all that information, the people and the unreachable mysteries in the rooms behind them spinning around me, have just been one packet of data sent in a split-second as the dyer buzzer startled me to consciousness?

Fact: We dream even during non R.E.M. sleep.

Lilith-tov (silliness)

I’m sitting in a huge bus with other girls my age. We are headed to a youth camp and I am very excited. I feel more like I am seated on a sofa and less like I am riding on a bus. I’m worried because I’m not wearing a seat belt. We are facing each other and not the front of the bus which allows for conversation. Everyone is talking but I am very quiet because I imagine myself as a projectile and worry about which girl I would fly into if the bus were to wreck.

The bus slows down and stops in front of a beach-themed restaurant. I look down at my bare feet. I’m sure that I can’t go in if I’m not wearing shoes. Just then I realize that I didn’t even pack for camp!

As I’m getting off the bus I confess my shoe-less state. A lady tells me, “That’s alright, we sell shoes here.” This is perfect because I love to shop! Inside, I find a section of the restaurant dedicated to boutique-cute clothing and footwear.

I expect to quickly purchase a pair of cheap flip-flops, since the restaurant has a beach theme, but the shoes look more like fancy boots. They are made of soft leather and they are decorated with real fur and jewels. The prices start at $80.00. If I spend $80.00 on shoes, I will have no money left for the rest of the trip.





I must have “shopped” too long because we are back on the bus and I don't remember eating. The girl seated across from me has straight black hair. She tells me, "Lie-lah had slanted eyes.” I realize that she is talking about Gutav Klimt’s painting, “The Tree of Life,” which I had looked at with much curiosity a few weeks before. How did she know? The girl has “slanted” eyes and looks just like “the other woman” in the painting. I realize that she isn’t just a stranger, or even a kid on the way to camp, but she is the daughter of the woman who wrote “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” I had just read her reply, "Why I love my strict Chinese mom" the night before. The girl across from me is a combination of the Tiger-daughter and the lady in Klimt's painting. The contradiction reminds me that I am dreaming.

Awareness of the dream always wakes me up or puts me in a state of sleep paralysis.

Dreams are fun to decode. Last night, before I went to bed, I completed a second lesson of Hebrew. I remember thinking after the first lesson that the Hebrew word for night, lialah, reminded me of the name, Lilith, as mentioned in the Talmud. “Lilith,” and all that the name implies, was how I remembered the Hebrew word for “night.” Maybe my trick backfired because last night I told hubby, “Lilith-tov,” instead of "Lialah-tov."

Weeks ago I had wondered if Klimt’s painting was of Adam, Eve, and Lilith. I wondered that, but couldn’t find anything to confirm or dispel it. I wonder if unsatiated curiosities manifest in dreams because they have not been filed or solved. Are mysteries the stuff of dreams?

Dreams fascinate me.

French, Dreams, and Learning

I am having a difficult time learning French. It's not finding a sticky place in my brain.

Yesterday, I forced myself to listen to a French talk-radio station (France Info 105.5 FM) that I found on the internet. French conversations served as background noise as I went about my day. I cooked to French, cleaned dishes to French, read some of “The Four Agreements” while trying to tune out French, and I commented on this site while listening to French. (My laptop is in my kitchen.)

Something interesting happened last night as I was falling asleep in the dark and quiet of my bedroom. As I was slipping into an unconscious state, I heard someone speaking in French. I didn't know what the words meant, but I knew that my brain was dealing with the new sounds and patterns that I had heard throughout the day. I hate it when awareness of dreaming wakes me up.


I had many dreams last night. In one of my dreams I was watching a huge pyramid-like structure in the process of being constructed. It was like an inverted Sierpenski gasket and as the little parts of the whole were being hoisted up and snapped into place, I was aware that each piece represented or contained some random bit of information that I had encountered throughout the day, including the Sierpenski triangle itself. I was an observer of the building process and I was being shown each piece and what it represented before it became a part of the whole. My reaction in the dream to each was, “Yes! I remember seeing that!” Of course, sitting here, I can’t remember the details of each piece that I was so aware of during the dream. It doesn't translate.


Research Links Sleep, Dreams, and Learning.

Dreaming is when new information finds a permanent home in the brain. Awareness of this influenced my dreams along with the new patterns, new shapes, and strange new sounds...

Here is another French radio station: RFI Monde 89.0 FM Paris



The image of the triangle was taken from The University of British Columbia's Math Department's web page.