I'm not sure why I have waited so long to write something for this blog. Maybe just preoccupied with other things. Such as school, work, and mainly trying my damnedest to help take care of my family. I don't really have any dreams to post right now, although I could bring some to mind that haven't been recorded. Now looking back I realize that sharing dreams is an oddly intimate gesture. Really the dreams I have shared on this blog were neatly abridged. Right now I am as usual pushing through what seems to be an transition in life. But I really must beg the question that if most of your life appears to be transitions doesn't that make the seemingly normal periods the actual transitions to what is really just the essential struggle of life? Humans have always struggled in this quest to live and breathe and reproduce ourselves to preserve our species, but we aren't alone in this all life that exists does with the very same primeval drive.

Here is a dream I hope I will remember. A dream I had where after going on a tremendously difficult and arduous journey with my family in a huge moving van with all of our belongings in the trailer we began to increase speed towards a large busy town center. The town was at the bottom of a hill and lights were on in all the restaurants and shops and people moved through the streets hurriedly. My wife was driving the van. She began to panic when we approached the certain disaster of moving too quickly into the congested area. It seemed that we would not be able to stop in time before plowing into people and slow moving vehicles or even buildings. As many dreams fail to agree with actual physical law this one followed that pattern; as I realized that I needed to act quickly I moved out of the van and somehow harnessed myself to it and began to pull it like an ox with a cart. Now at this point the van was careening down a steep embankment towards a shallow river. I somehow, not knowing how, held my course and seeing a path through the river and up the other side continued to pull my family in the van. The path up the other side was a steep climb but was paved and there were fallen trees blocking some of the way. I struggled to maintain the course but seemed to have some miraculous help in keeping on the path. Carefully I maneuvered through the fallen trees and was able to reach a place where the path leveled and I could clearly see that although the path I took was not a path that anyone had ventured to try recently that it became a very clear path and a straight path that led down a very peaceful road towards the most beautiful sunset that I could imagine. There were gentle pastures on either side of the path that was bathed in the most amazing golden colors of orange and yellow and white. I knew that once I reached this clearing and saw the extended pathway that I had done well to help my family reach safety and peace.

Inner-volition

It has been nearly a year since I last posted on this blog. The amazing thing is that no one probably knows. I have had a landslide of a year. It seems that I put off too many issues that I did not know how to deal with and eventually it caught up to me. Dreams are often an indication of what you deal with when you are awake. They manifest themselves in a surreal way, sometimes disturbing. Any unsettling feelings that one has during the waking hours may come back as the same monsters camouflaged for a different setting. I don’t have any immediate dreams that I can recall from the days recent. But I have awakened with the same undertone of turbulence most times I awake. A house divided cannot stand. I have had divided feelings and ideas for a long time I think. Fighting for peace is what those who claim to love it, and its sister democracy do. But fighting for peace is what I do each day when I rise I look for ways to bring peace to the table. I do not enjoy confrontation. I think that there have been few times in my life where confrontation seemed like a good idea. Albeit necessary on some occasions to face conflict head on. I find that turning the other cheek is the more peace seeking route to follow. Maybe not democratic, but peaceable; however lately I have noticed that Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and others have shown a different path that involves peace but also shows a non violent approach to making political points. It is easy to see that their paths made these “statements” necessary to achieve an end. When I was a boy I could make my dream paths change when I got older the dreams came in their own form in their own pace and I could not reach the state of control a place of inner-volition.

inhuman capabilities

There is a place in dreams where we can expel any inhibition and are able to react to situations, albeit unnatural or surreal, and be someone who we could never be. This might not be entirely true, perhaps the person we see ourselves as in dreams could be a monster retained by our better awakened reason. I had the same type of dream two nights in a row it was regarding a fantasy world of mobsters at war in a land ruled by greed and treason. I was in the midst of them, one of them, rather one of the chiefest of sinners in the lot. I found myself throttling men who may not have been innocent men, but in reality how could I ever know my capabilities of killing or harming someone if it is not in my waking nature to do so. People look at killers and judge and rightly so, but how far down does anger and violence dwell. We hope there is no such monster in us. We hope that only fear and the need to defend would arouse such thoughts and feelings of inhuman capabilities. We are all innocent except in the realm of the night where dreams unfurl lavishness and animalistic brutality. We are awake now, aren’t we?

Sometimes it seems that all energies are spent on things that don’t require attention. Last night I had a dream that I was shopping at a secondhand store in a town that I had not been in for at least a decade in Oregon. I went into the shop to buy a suit and tie. I could not find a price on the tie and went to a clerk to ask for a price. I thought I heard wrong when I heard “35$”, so I asked again, the price was 35$. I flabbergasted said something under my breath and stormed out of the store with nothing. This was just a dream but when I awoke I had a feeling of being swindled. Are we all being swindled? I think we need to be on our guard, things have gotten so that many of us are unaware of most things going on around us the leaders of our country would like for us to all sit quietly and to more importantly believe that we are drifting smoothly on calm waters. The sea will remain calm only for a finite period then sooner or later a storm will rise up from the deep. So when a secondhand neck tie costs 35$ at Goodwill. Then we will know something is wrong, no, that is not what I think I am saying. Crap sneaks up on you kind of quickly when you are looking elsewhere. That is what I think I am saying.

It is hard to imagine sometimes why each day can seem so mundane. The world has come to be a bleached soulless place with nothing being the call word and nothing being the signal and nothing doing. God has allowed glimpses of what beauty we've forgotten to catch us off guard occasionally and we think "oh, there was life there must be life and I must find it!" But the mediocrity of life quickly seeps back in like muddy water into a footprint in bog. The truth is what it has always been and why does it seem to get so hard to cognitively bring it to mind. There are dark forces at work and each of them work together to destroy any feelings of joy, any that there may be of peace, any of satisfaction, any of charity, or love. We distract ourselves with anything the dissatisfying programs on television, the movies that continue to amaze us with how unoriginal they are, the books that have reached beyond what made classic literature what it is to find more mediocrity, and the music that has reduced itself to basal urges accompanied by beats that a toddler could outdo on a nice cooking pan with a spoon. So what can we do to rectify this terrible state that we have fallen to? Only one thing comes to mind. If we do not succumb to the primal urges that draw us to waste countless hours online and waste countless hours doing nothing running errands for things we don’t need; we can turn into vegetables that have no purpose and could not recognize one if one were to bite us in the face. Pray people God still hears us God still answers us and prayer is the one weapon we have to keep us from composting in this heap of human waste we find ourselves in.

There are times when everyday feels like a dream when the tiresome ploughing and trudging through each day is so much like not being awake that sleep has no appeal.
The sundown is a terrible fierce foe that stalks me and pokes and jabs me in my kidneys as the darkness creeps in around me and takes away any hope that I may have had to overcome the idleness of the day and actually do something anything that will accomplish a task. Even a menial task would make it appear to be somewhat worthwhile. The sundown has always been my enemy and will rarely let me have peace. There are some exceptions, perhaps on an unusual day the peace of an isolated circumstance will settle like the arms of God wrapping around my shoulders and offering an assuring embrace and the descent of night becomes a wholly welcome time on these unusual days. Surely as the stars begin represent nights gone past and volumes of unspoken dreams twinkling in the dusky air, I look up and thank God for giving me this gift a token of solace in an unsettled disturbing world that chases me always and on this night was unable to find me...