Dream:

My items were being scanned at the checkout of H.E.B. Plus as I woke up. This was another dream that created a storyline around the sound that pulled me out of sleep. Before I had placed my items on the conveyer belt, I was walking around the store wearing a hat that was three feet tall. I wanted to laugh out loud as I imagined what the other customers were thinking as they looked at me. I tried to keep a straight face. A man sporting a head of disheveled hair gave me an inquisitive look, and I told him, “You have strange hair.” I was projecting in my dream. =D

Before I had selected the tall hat, I had tried on others. I was looking at my reflection in the glass doors of the frozen food section. I remember thinking that the hats were similar to something Lady Gaga would wear.

Before the hats, I was sitting at a table in a restaurant when my Aunt Lucy came up to me and said, “Grandma’s kidneys are failing.” She put her head on mine and I could tell that she was very tired. I asked Lucy if she could help me with Kelsey’s prom dress, which I remember thinking was selfish even in my dream.

I can’t remember much before that.

***

Looked at some houses yesterday. The kids fell in love with one on Riata, but I think it's too small. Where will we put MY books and HIS tools? I sure do miss our old Tanglewood home! He had a 20x20 workshop...

More on Dreams

“Jaime had never realised that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realised it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vrooom.” Good Omens

I hate it when, in my dream, I am lying down or viewing the dream-world from my bed. Maybe it is another symptom of sleep paralysis, only instead of being totally conscious while unable to move my body, my unconscious mind is restricted by the placement of my physical body. How is that for a role reversal?

That happened to me last night; I dreamed that I was lying in bed staring at the ceiling. A vine poked through the ceiling and began to grow straight down to the floor as if the sun was below me and the sky was the earth. I was amazed in my dream that I could witness the growth of the vine. I thought that maybe this is what happens when I am sleeping – I go into slow motion as time around me goes into fast forward mode.

I saw that another vine was growing up from a pot sitting on the floor. The two vines stopped midway and began to spin around as if blindly feeling for the other. Finally, they connected and began to tangle and grow towards the right side of the room. The vine that had come from the ceiling suffocated the vine that grew up from the floor and this was very disturbing to me. The vine I had watched in amazement caused me to forget about the vine that I was to nurture. It was my fault and I felt guilt and remorse.

I’ve wondered if dreams are symbolic or if they are so literal that we are forced to give them too much meaning. I remember a dream I had as a little girl after a bout with a stomach virus. I was dreaming that my step-dad was chasing butterflies with a butterfly net. I emerged from that dream to my mother saying, “Tony (my step-dad) caught your bug.” That always fascinated me. Why, in a dream state, would my mind interpret the dreaded “pukes” as a beautiful butterfly? Literally, my step-dad had caught my “bug” which was symbolized as a butterfly?

I did go outside this morning to check on the landscaping. I often pull and redirect passion vines from roses, but this morning I attempted to pry tight tendrils away from my grapevine and ended up just yanking the aggressive vine out of the dirt. I had redeemed myself!

Which makes me wonder: What does poison ivy look like again?

Saturday Silliness (dream)

Salvador Dali "Sleep"

The sound of thunder woke me up this morning. Remember that earthquake of a thunderclap? Anyway, I was in the middle of an audio-dream. Do you ever have audio dreams; the dreams that are more verbal than visual or emotional? It’s as if someone is talking to you in your ear - real time. It’s not always associated with a story or a plot. Sometimes, the words conclude a dream, like a punctuation. I don’t always remember the actual dream, but sometimes I will remember the parting words.

This morning my dream ended with a voice saying, “Some people wake up to light and some people wake up to wind…” just as the thunder was pulling me out of my sleep.

At first, I thought, “Silly unconscious brain! You forgot about how some people might wake up to sound!” But, after I thought about it, I realized that when you are experiencing something, it speaks for itself. The fact that it was happening to me completed the thought. “Some people wake up to light, some people wake up to wind, but you will wake up to thunder!” How cool to become a part of the narrative. Wait, I already was, it was I who was dreaming.

It’s very windy right now. If the wind woke you up, I guess you were one of the people who woke up late! Lazy!

Isn’t that fun? My dream made me didactic. =P

That concludes my little post on "Saturday Silliness." But, before I go, I have to share with you something my nine year old told me:

Last night, while watching a play put on by the junior high homeschoolers, I leaned over and whispered something in my nine year old’s ear. He put his hand up in front of my mouth and whisper-screamed, “Mom, your breath is burning my eyes!” Isn't that sweet?

It wasn’t onions, I promise, it was my menthol cough drops. I’ve been hitting the cough drops like an addict lately. I've been coughing for three to four weeks since the flu. Seriously, it was the cough drops!

P.S. Don't you think it's hypocritical of me, unemployed and all, to call someone sleeping in on Saturday "lazy?"

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.

Buckle up! The train of thought can't stay on track.

One evening I was bored so I began to follow tweeted links and ended up at an interesting article, “Slow Down,” over at The Beautiful Brain. It was a little write-up about how our perception of time can be distorted when we watch a slow-motion scene in a movie. It included a video montage which only took a few seconds to watch.



One of the links on the side of the webpage caught my eye, as it looked more interesting, “The Neuroscience of Avatar.” Gustav Klimt's "The Tree of Life" decorated the article.















I began to wonder about Gustav Klimt. If this was a painting of THE biblical Tree of Life, then who were the people in front of the tree? A couple seemed to be locked in embrace as another woman watched jealously from the other side of the canvas. From deep in the prison of my memory escaped the name, “Lilith.” I was off to search for more information about Lilith and Adam, and Adam and Eve. I had no idea that Lucifer himself might be a vertex in a love triangle.

On my way to the first couple, the other first couple, I found a web page warning of racism in the Talmud and then another site that explained the purpose of the Talmud. Midrash. Why don’t we have that? It would answer at least one of the questions posed by Legion over at the Victoria Advocate Online. Of course, answering that question would give us many more.

Back to triangles and The Tree of Life. If that was Lilith, she was clothed mostly in triangles while Adam and Eve were robed in geometrical shapes, mostly circles. The ground contained circular shapes; the branches of the tree coiled around and around... Lilith was not from the earth like the tree and Adam and Eve.

Speaking of circles and embrace, Henri Matisse was born on this date.

Anyway, back to that night: That night I had a dream about a painting similar to Grant Wood’s American Gothic.






























In my dream, the woman was made of water. Two men, not just the one with the pitchfork, were standing beside her with a look of malcontent. A love triangle? It was inspired by the occupants of the painting, The Tree of Life. I am not grasping the point of the dream.

The song from the video montage was beautiful. If you didn't watch the video montage earlier in this post, please listen to the song: Sigur Ros "Staralfur."

Another song that was in my head around this time was "Lunatic Fringe." Red Rider - Lunatic Fringe According to Wikipedia, "The song was inspired by a book about humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg and is about the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1970s." I figured it reminded me of the religious and political debates over at The VicAd - and myself as I feel I'm sort of on the fringe, at least when it comes to education.

And here is another song written by Tom Cochrane, the man who wrote "Lunatic Fringe," Life Is A Highway - Rascal Flatts Official Music Video

Be safe out there and Happy New Year!

Do you believe in ghosts?

I was shocked when I looked at the clock and realized it was 2:00am. I couldn't sleep. The steady noise produced by the box fan seemed to solidify the air -suffocating me. Every few seconds the chain from the ceiling fan struck the metal casing that shields the bulb, acting as a cymbal in the symphony of my insomnia. I wasn't tired.

Usually, when I can't fall asleep I tell myself (imagine) a story just to cast a shadow over the thoughts that keep me wired. I always fall asleep before a plot unfolds. Sometimes I read a book and sometimes I watch television, but hubby was asleep and I was scared to move.

I feel like my mind has stagnated and it's because I have not allowed thoughts to flow, naturally. I fill up my waking hours with purposeful thoughts or some type of digital entertainment, even when I'm doing "work," which should free my mind to wander. As I fall asleep at night I try to corral the stream of thoughts that run through my mind. A wandering mind during consciousness is like entering dream-state during sleep - both are important to our mental health. I haven't allowed my mind to be free.

I wondered if controlling the thoughts of children five days a week was healthy for intellectual growth. I wondered if it was healthy for me, so I tried to think of nothing - just to see what would surface.

I pushed my thoughts out of my mind and sometimes caught myself slipping into sleep. This awareness quickly woke me up and I was back to the humming of my room.

Box fan and ceiling fan - there was a rhythm. I could stack it like blocks in my mind.

Maybe someone was mowing their yard? I was standing in the tall grass back at my childhood home admiring the gray water. I looked to my left and I noticed that a stranger was using a push mower to mow our fourteen acres along the bay. My "mee-mee" always mowed the grass on her riding lawnmower. I felt sorry for the stranger but there was a nice breeze.

Someone whispered in my ear that my childhood home was now for sale and I wanted to buy it. In real life the two-story country home on the water I grew up in would never be affordable - even if I had a job. I knew hubby would never move back to Port Lavaca, even if to live out in the country and on the water.

I turned to go up the hill towards the house but I was standing in a grass-less unfamiliar pasture looking back at an unfamiliar one-story small white house. I had never seen it before, but it felt like home.

Little Tykes toys littered the yard. I imagined myself reading a book on a blanket under the sun. I wanted to have a family from Canada come and stay for a few days. I thought about how I would approach the subject with my husband. "They are free-range hippies."

When I woke up I was sad. There is a part of me that I can never have. I miss the house I grew up in. I feel like a part of me is still there. I feel sorry for whoever lives in that house now. I haunt that house in my dreams.

I am the ghost.

*****

This song reminded me of this dream:

This is your brain on tired.

I was thinking about dreams earlier. Not my hopes and aspirations but the little stories that play out in my head when I'm asleep. I close my eyes every night to end my predictable mundane day and enter an exotic world where the laws of man, God, and even physics don’t apply.

If I’m lucky I sleep. I have nights of insomnia which might explain my fascination with dreams. Dreaming is proof of sleep, right?

Sometimes I keep a notebook and pen by my bed so that I can write down my dreams as soon as I wake up. Consciousness pushes many dreams out of my memory. Maybe dreams weren't meant to be remembered.

I read somewhere* that during R.E.M. newly acquired information is filed and stored in the memory. I guess new facts and data whirl around like bits of confetti until we sleep and dream. That’s when the bits get defragmented and sorted allowing for more efficient retrieval. McMemory.

So while our brains are busy filing and doing very important serious work that’s for our own good we repay that feat by reducing it all to a nonsensical story.

It’s kinda funny how even when we are asleep we get bored. The tedious task of storing and filing data causes our unconscious minds to wander. To zone out. Dream.

*Every time I hear myself say "I read somewhere" what follows reminds me of Tim-the-tool-man-Taylor as he tried to relate Wilson's fence side chats...

Coffee thoughts - multiple ages in the learning environment

This post should follow Family Learning: Converting Fahrenheit to Celcius (turned into a rant on democratic schools):

This morning my son and I were playing around on the internet. Actually, he had woken up and crawled in my lap while I was reading about Eva Braun. I had a dream last night about her children surviving….something about an article that was written before WWII coming back to haunt us…... something about two rivers… one was discovered to be frozen….for some reason that was important. You know how dreams are? I recently read, “Eye of the Needle,” by Ken Follett, so my mind must be wrestling with pieces of the book and my constant flipping between channels 75 and 29.

Anyway, as usual, my son started to quiz me. “What does H K L E spell?” May be when a child is on the verge of reading they have these random letters dancing around in their head mocking them as their minds try to make sense of them. He needs my input to help him crack the code and find a way to stick these random letters together. I guess it’s like my mind as I sleep. I have experiences during my day and at night my mind is trying to file but some things aren’t definable and easily classified so they hang around and torment me. I wake up and look up Eva Braun. Maybe the unsolved information gets left on the surface so that we can figure it out. So, my WWII dream and ABCs are on our minds this morning.

After the spelling quiz my son went over to the dry erase board and began to quiz me in math. “What is C plus 5?” I told him that it could be anything depending on what he wanted C to be. I told him to give me any number and we could find out what C was. We did this a few times until he was satisfied. Then I walked away to start this blog because something about my dream and his first morning thoughts about his ABCs seemed important to me before I finished this cup of coffee.

As I was typing he called me back to the dry erase board and he had written: F=9/3+365 He must have paid attention to his sister’s calculations on the dry erase board the past few days. The formula has been and is still on the board today. I told him that it was easy to solve because 9/3 is another way of expressing the number 3. I solved it and told him that F was 368 and that he had done Algebra today. He looked upset and said, “Now I have to skip to Algebra.”

I assured him that he didn’t have to skip to Algebra.

Now he is singing and playing bottle cap wars with his bottle cap collection.

But, this reminded me of when my oldest was learning Algebra. My daughter played around with some trinomials and factored a few with him. I made sure to make hers easy as she was just seven or eight. I blogged about it back then.

Over the years I have learned and observed the benefits of having different ages or grades learning in one room. I can see how multiple stages and ages are a good blend in the learning environment. They influence and challenge each other…….

Just sharing my morning thoughts over coffee.

I forgot to mention that at one point he asked me, "What is a google plus a google?" I answered with, "TWO google." He said, "No because a google is a mystery number." I went with it because he was defining google as a mystery number and he drew it as circles in circles. We could work with that. I just thought that was interesting. I guess to him as he learns how to add and subtract he watches his sister as she seemingly breaks all of the rules so he breaks and creates them too.