19 September 2013                             This was begun more than a couple of weeks ago then put
Thursday                                           on hold, until finished today. 2 October2013
5:00 AM

Sometimes I can't even find escape through sleep.

I woke up at three-thirty this morning from a dream. I usually don't have bad dreams. Usually the first part of my dreams are about filing away the events of the day, the second part is oriented about special events, replaying events multiple times each time differently, in an effort to gain a different point of view.


These are often about similar events that I have experienced in my past which are somewhat puzzling to me, but these dreams are not exactly about the events themselves as they were, they seem to be those events that are just slightly off from my past experiences. Almost as if I were trying something out to settle my understanding about some of the events of my life that had occurred. Many times the events will run through a certain set of limited circumstances, then recycle through those same circumstances all over again, only just a slight bit different. It seems as if I were unconsciously trying out one set of circumstances after an other in order to learn something about the sequence that has me concerned. When I make sense of something the slightly recycling dream ceases, and its on to the next troubling vignette. Often these dreams are not difficult but there is sometimes a difficult sequence that seems to either become somewhat frustrating as it keeps repeating or I wake up as the sequence is unfolding and it is just disturbing enough to kept me from returning to sleep.


The third style in this succession of dreams is during the last part of the sleep/dream cycle and it is usually the fantastical dream sequences, like flying, or hovering just barely two feet above the ground and finding that it is just barely easier moving this way rather than walking. Or dreaming that I can motivate just like a Kangaroo by hoping in long graceful hops for miles on end. These are usually fun or at least interesting.


Its usually the dreams that occur in the second phase of the dream cycle that are the ones that wake me up. It seems as if the dream is an unconscious effort of my mind to work through trying to understand something in such a way that I understand it better. In this case I already understand, but I seem to dislike the perceived results anyway.


I awoke dreaming that I was in my back yard, in my bathrobe looking at the part of the ground that is of poor soil and is full of lichens, British red soldier lichens in fact. Then I noticed someone in the eastern side of my border that I shared with my neighbor that was wooded on both parts of the boundary. There was a sense of a person in that woods that straddled the border who was cutting some of the conifer trees in the border. I couldn't make out who the person was, but I could definitely tell that someone was attacking the trees there. I began to walk toward the axe cutting the trees and seeing the parts of the trees collecting in a pile. As I came closer the axe stops and the remaining dead wood is suddenly in flames. Flames were leaping into the the air. There was a single dead tree aflame but the flames did not spread to the rest of the trees.


As I quickly hurried forward to ask what did they think they were doing? I began to fade from the dream, but not before the words began to form in my mind, “Its not your any more, you now longer can control how it will end up.” I seemed to be lifting off my feet as if I were being taken away, the scene grew smaller beneath me and in my minds eye I could see mortgage papers being signed by unknown people, in an unknown office. I could see and hear the birds I used to watch in my yard, the deer who often came through there, and dropped their twin fawns several years in my back yard. The place where I buried two of my deceased dogs in the back under the lilac bush, the ghost images of the ten full chord woodpiles that were cut, split and stacked, then seasoned before burning. Part of me will always remain there, and yet no one will be able to see any effect of my having been there.


It feels on one part as if I have died, I have been hustled away from a very special spot, and I don't have any control over it. I can still see the beauty and the joy that that property allowed me to have. I awoke and was totally awake, staring at the ceiling, not wanting to go back to sleep. There was no fear of returning to sleep, rather a wanting to be as close as possible to. What for me was a very special home. For the rest of the evening I recalled gardens I had grown, the produce I had nurtured from the soil. The snow that I had moved from the yard, drive and from the roadside. The walks with the dogs, the nightly trips to the end of the drive, their explosions acroos the road in the dark to explore the land across the road in the USDA area. The way they always came back when done. The bark of the chainsaw as itbit into those logs I used for my only sourceof heat for almost ten years.


Where I am now seems so foreign, so cold, so inhuman. I just couldn't go back to sleep.