Lost: One hour. If found, please return to me. I’m pretty sure my dream is in it.
A book on lucid dreaming landed in my lap. Between it and a book my baby brother recently published called (W)hole ~ From Absence To Abundance: Poems of Recovery and Faith from Stevie G, my entire ten minute attention span between working all day with students who are learning Somatic Experiencing, and falling into an exhausted sleep at Mercy Center, I read. Steven’s poetry enlightens me as to his process; alternately warming and shredding my heart with the poignancy of growing up with our mother, who just didn’t understand babies. Bless his heart, brother Steve has opened a vein and mined it. Those similarly afflicted - being raised by narcissistic mothers, may relate, and develop empathy and compassion for self and others. I wish him great success. (Available on Amazon.com)
I’ve gotten through about one third of A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming: Mastering the Art of Oneironautics by Dylan Tuccillo, Jared Zeizel, and Thomas Peisel. The cover text promises it will help me to:
> Open doors to creativity and insight
> Remember dreams and defuse nightmares
> Fly, shape-shift and reconnect with loved ones.
Wow. Sign me up!
Alas, lucid dreaming remains elusive. The first step is to REMEMBER a dream. My sleep cycles appear to be so dys-regulated by night sweats and whiplash pain as to be unserviceable containers for dream fragments to zap memory receptors in my brain. I imagine the fragments would sound a bit like mosquitos and moths getting zapped in a bug zapper apparatus.
After a touching Moth-Story-Telling session Saturday night, (no moths were harmed) with our daughter in Oakland and nine of her friends, my husband and I straightened up, put food away and went to bed by 1 a.m. Pacific Daylight Savings Time, while said daughter and several of those same friends went to the tail end of an “eighties” themed thirty-ninth birthday party for a Jr. High School friend who usually attends the story telling, but couldn’t this time because of his birthday conflict.
The theme for the story-telling was “Losing It.” It could have been about the time-futz, loss in general, getting angry or sad or terrified - anything that the title suggested to us. I sang a song meant to be a buffer against loss. Malvena Reynolds wrote: “If you love me, if you love, love, love me... plant a rose for me. And if you think you’ll love me for a long, long time... plant an apple tree. The sun will shine, the wind will blow, the rain will fall and the tree will grow, and whether you comes or whether you goes, I’ll have an apple and I’ll have a rose. Delicious to bite and nice to my nose, and every juicy nibble will be a sweet reminder of the time you loved me and planted a rose for me... and an apple tree.”
Mark told the story that made me fall in love with him the day we met in 1972 - the one about “losing it” and accidentally breaking the glass door of Bank of America at the corner of Hollywood and Highland. It’s still a great story. This time I didn’t laugh ‘til I nearly peed my pants, but all of us laughed a lot at his wondrous pantomime and voice mimicry of characters involved.
One gal, new to the venue, mistook the intimacy created by deep listening for a group-therapy session. While all of us were deeply moved by her disclosure of terrible knowledge and surviving difficult passages in life, we were also a bit befuddled and bemused by the direction her “story” took us. Her boyfriend and my honey each told “lighter” stories afterwards, as a way to wash away the imprint of her dump. It was all a bit exhausting.
Sleeping in Sunday morning until “new time” 9:30 was a good plan. No alarms were set that would scare dreams away, but without a long enough stretch to catch the REM wave, I seem to be a hopeless case for nailing down any dream, let alone a lucid one!
The idea of lucid dreaming is that you set an intention to wake up in the dream, so you know that you ARE dreaming, and so that you can begin to guide your dreams to solve problems, reveal your innermost heart’s desires, and generally come into greater congruence with your true essence. Sigh... I DO want to join the club, but feel like a total failure.
I may have to seek help for deeper sleep, more contiguous hours of the lovely stuff, or wait until I catch my lost hour when we all regain one next fall.
Happy Daylight Savings Time.... ZZZzzzzzz
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