Day: January 15, 2019

One of my very first memories is bright sunshine and the smell of bleach. The warm spring wind is blowing and my Mom is hanging sheets out on a clothes line. I’m sitting on the red brick steps leading out from the little four room house in which we live into the back yard. I know we had a washing machine, one of those with the wringer on the top to run the clothes through….but no dryer. I was probably four years old…the spring of 1955. I’m not sure what else I did and didn’t do on that warm spring day. Someone took a photo of Mom and me though. It’s around somewhere, I don’t know where though. I have the memory, and that’s better than a snapshot because I can still feel the heat from the sun, and the smell of clover in the soft wind. I can still see the fresh, clean sheets flapping in the wind. I look up at the blue sky, so much more deep and dark blue then it is now. The world itself was so new, so exciting. Everything I loved and wanted back then was so close that I could reach out and touch it, and I had a perfect sense of security.

People lose a lot of things in their lives. We lose our innocence and we lose our money. We lose our car keys and our sunglasses. Sometimes we lose our dogs and cats…though I hope not too often. Sometimes we lose our car in the parking lots. I’ve had to use my little “beeper” by hitting lock over and over so I could find my cars a lot of times. Wally world parking lots are big and when I go in, I’m not thinking to good sometimes. Losing humans is a totally different matter.

When you lose a person, a loved one, the security of your life takes a huge blow. The sky darkens and the blue is hidden. When the fresh smell of life turns into the cloying odor you smell when you walk into a funeral home you realize that you should have touched them more, talked to them more, and said I love you more.

But then, every day when we wake up we have another chance. Another chance at the sunshine and warmth of spring. Another chance to smell the flowers, taste the food, and see the sky. We have another chance, because most of us still have loved ones, we have another chance to do all the things with them and for them that we might have liked to do with those who are now gone. I loved the moon tonight through the trees, shining so brightly and crystal clear. The moon encompassing the souls of all those who have gone before us…saying “I understand”

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 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.