Day: January 15, 2018

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Of dreams and old people

Sometimes when you dream, you wake up wondering why you dreamed what you did. There are all kinds of scientific explanations about what dreams are; about what causes them.
 
I have on some occasions been having a dream, got up and gone to the bathroom, or something else, and lay back down and resumed that very same dream. I wonder how that is possible? I suppose with the human mind, many things are possible that we do not even imagine.
 
I think as humans age, they dream more and more….perhaps because they actually sleep more, but actually perhaps, it’s because they are transitioning. The body and the mind seem to be “unlinking” somehow. Sometimes the dreams are due to diseases which attack the brain. My Daddy had Lewy Body dementia, which causes very vivid and (to the person with the disease) realistic dreams. They swear things which they dream have really happened.
 
Scientific explanations aside…..I wonder if our dreams are somehow a pathway to a place beyond where we are now?
 
I used to sit up with sick people back in the day, some of them who were on death’s door. They all dreamed throughout the night. Many of them told me of dreaming about people who had gone on before them, or about sweet dreams of pleasant things.
 
One man with whom I had worked in the Weave room at Trion, fixed looms all night long in his sleep, including the hand and arm motions involved. I asked him once when he woke up if he remembered what he had dreamed. “I dreamed about going home.” he said. “I dreamed about going home” A couple of weeks later, he did.
 
I can only remember two dreams from my early childhood. This was in the days when we lived over on the end of Simmons street in Trion. We moved there early in 1955 and moved out in the summer of 1962.
 
Both of them were very vivid and real to me.
 
In one of them, we had walked out the front door into the front yard and heard a great din of sound from above us. I looked up, and the sky was filled with every size and shape of space ship or flying saucer imaginable. “They have come to get us.” my Dad said. Then I woke up. Mind you, this was somewhere around 1960 or 61 when I had this dream. Long before “Star Wars” or “Star Trek”
 
“They have come to get us….”
 
In the other dream, we went out the back door to our neighbors fence. It was a very intricately made fence, kind of a “woven” effect. There was a great multitude of people standing out there, starting from just outside our door, and stretching as far as the eye could see. Sitting on the top of that intricate fence was God….in flowing robes and long white beard, and people were approaching one at a time for their judgement. Some were going through a gate in the fence, (which was never there in real life) while others were being zapped by God with his staff. I figured that the ones going through the gate were headed to heaven. The others…well…I woke up before it was my turn. I expect this dream was the oldest of the two.
 
So, here I sit wondering about dreams. I’ve been thinking about dreams all day.
 
I wonder if I’ll be going home, or if I’ll be picked up by aliens, or if the judgement of God awaits. Perhaps none of the three, perhaps all of the three.
 
Probably something totally different and unexpected that nobody…nobody…dreams of….
 
I’m sure I’ll dream again tonight and maybe I’ll remember what I dream. Maybe not.
 
As for ya’ll my friends….pleasant dreams.
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We are judged

Judgement.  Is this all there is?  We are judged for everything it seems.  We also do a lot of judging of others. Both consciously and unconsciously.  I have done it.  You have done it.  Everyone judges. Everyone seems to want somebody, some other human being that they judge to be beneath them.

Due to their economic station, due to their geographic location.  Due to the color of their skin, due to the job that they are in.  Due to their gender.  Because of who they love, or don’t.

Due to the culture in which they grew up.

We judge.  I judge.

I don’t know at what point in humanity’s history the judging began.  Was it when we started living together as tribes?  Was it when we started building villages, towns and cities? Was it when we developed worship of God, or Gods?

It really doesn’t matter.  We judge, a lot.

I remember as a young child we at the very first had no television.  We had a Philco radio with a built in record player.  Daddy listened to music on the radio, and that was also where he got his news.  That radio, and newspapers.  The Atlanta Journal and Constitution! That was the hookup.

Daddy usually only bought the paper on Sundays, and that thing was huge! There were so many sections to go through.  At first, I was only interested in the comics. Brightly colored and filled with so many comic strips, and so much fun.  Dagwood and Blondie, Snuffy Smith, Steve Canyon, Dick Tracy, Pogo, Peanuts, and many more.  Great writers and wonderful columnists.  One of these days I want to write about this great paper, but suffice it to say at this point this was our main hookup for news.  Then we got Huntley and Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite.  These were men that were easy to trust.

There were three networks then.  There were censors who wouldn’t let the people making the TV programs put bad words in their programs.  They even made Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke sleep in separate beds on the “Dick Van Dyke” show.  I know a lot of things may have been taking place “behind the scenes” back in those days.  Human beings certainly aren’t perfect and there were a lot of injustices taking place in our society back in those days.  There was a lot of hard judgement going on “behind the scenes” actually.  Not just in the fledgling TV industry, but in all of culture and society in America.  People in normal society were doing the judging every day, and no television show of that day and age accurately portrayed what was going on in America and rest of the world.  It was simply a sanitized version of life.  No family in America was like the Cleavers, or the Anderson families.

It didn’t take the information age too awful long to catch up with the rest of society.  That was in the late fifties and early sixties, and it’s now 2018.  Fifty years later and we are dealing with television news shows that you have to take your children out of the room for, because of the bad words in them.  We are dealing with channels with programs and shows you have to lock you children out of so they cannot watch. There are shows on which there is nothing but judging going on.  “Vote you off the island” has become a catch word.  You are not judged worth.  “Pack up your knives and go”  You can’t even cook a decent meal.

The “social” media networks are filled with super hyped partisan bantering that more often than not becomes name calling, curse filled, vile and foul language that should not be spoke or written.  I have written some four letter words in some of my posts on social media, but never have I witnessed some of the language and some of the direct threats to life and limb as I have seen on Facebook and Twitter.  That’s the only two I really ever get on, but I’m sure that it’s also bad on some of the other media outlets which I don’t frequent.  And, it’s all about judgement.

It’s all variations of the same types of things I listed above in the first paragraph.  Judgement.  Judging.  Self Righteousness.

When will it stop?  Is this all there is?  Judging.

“imagine all the people….living life in peace…..you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one….”  thank God I’m not the only one, and neither are you.  Let’s evolve.  Let’s develop.  Let’s live and let live.