kareina

Dreams have been really weird--I woke this morning from a dream where I took a pause from travelling down a narrow river canyon (presumably on a raft) to read the hand written replies from Uther, King of Drachenwald (who is a Western Duke in not-dreamland), the Queen (I don't recall who she was, but she is actually from Drachenwald) Margaret (Drachenwald Seneschal) and other members of the Drachenwald Law Council to a hand written letter I had sent (the Crown had requested that the letter be hand written).

In the dream I realized that I really should have taken a photo of my letter before I sent it, since I had written in a stream of consciousness from the heart, but I no longer remembered what I had written nor what topics I had covered.

So I was trying to open the intricately folded letters in today's packet (one from each person replying to me, all on different papers, with different hand writing styles, and different folding patterns) and trying to get photos because I was afraid the writing might get daaged in the process, (both from the unfolding, and from the river water splashing) and I was having problems reading them (I never can read when I am dreaming). I was also hoping that they had used old school letter replying techniques, wherein one repeats the question before replying, so that I could guess what they were replying to...

When I woke I could tell that we've been doing lots of cleaning and other work at the house. We slept 9 hours last night, but my body says it could happily sleep another 3 or 4 now that I've acceded to its demands to empty my bladder. My arms have that pleasant ache one gets from having a training program that is just perfect for improving strength, without over doing it.

In my dream last night I had flown into a major airport, where I met up with linda_linsefors and we proceeded to walk through the airport, till we went through a door beyond which we were to show our passports in preparation to go through security on our way to our next flight. I was very aware in the dream that this was one of those airports in which this was a "point of no return", that once we had gone through this checkpoint we couldn't go back again. Suddenly I looked down at the little black pull along carry-on sized suitcase I was dragging, and realized that it wasn't mine, that someone I was dragging her bag, and that we had left all of my luggage behind. So, rather than taking my passport out I asked the guy at the desk if we could go back and get my stuff. The next thing I knew we were at the customer service desk for my airlines, and they were fetching me out my little black little black pull along carry-on sized suitcase, which looked different from linda_linsefors. At that point we started to turn to go, when I realized that, actually, I had checked that bag on the last flight, but I also needed my littler bag to be carried from my shoulder that I had used on a carry on (Note: both suitcases also exist in the real world, one is the one I use these days when I travel, the other is an older one I used to use, but I gave to linda_linsefors when she needed a bag of that type for conference travel. However, the little shoulder bag I had as a carry on bag I don't recognize at all, and I wonder why I wasn't using my every day backpack, which has many advantages over the open-topped bag in the dream?)

After the customer service agent fetched me the littlest bag, too, linda_linsefors then spent some time trying to reorganize all of our stuff, because we now also had a bunch of loose stuff that needed to be packed, and we were worried we had too much to take with us based on luggage allowances, so we needed to make it all fit, and the pair of scissors I had in my hand had to be packed into the bag we were going to check, since we can't carry it on the next flight. Through this part of the dream I was feeling stressed and worried about getting everything packed so we could continue our journey, since we still needed to walk back to the passport guy, and then go through security, find our gate, and board the plane before it takes off.

At this stage I woke up, not feeling any where near as rested as one would hope after nearly eight hours of sleep.

If ever a dream was a clear message from one's subconscious, this one is. It wants me to take the time of finishing up everything that isn't done from the last stage of the journey before embarking on the next stage, and it wonders if there is time to do this. Given that I do have a report and paper to finish up for my research project, the contract for which is ending with the end of this month, and starting starting in January I go on 1/4 time at work with some new duties plus the huge list of projects I have been waiting to start "once this job ends", the message from my subconscious is not news at all. Why is it that dream messages rarely have anything new to impart, but so often just emphasize what we already know with our waking minds?

In other news, I had lots of fun at the Frostheim Jul event last night--it was a lovely, low key event wherein I got to chat one on one with most of the (about 20 to 25?) people there, did a bit of singing, and actually got to eat food because the potluck started early enough in the evening. I also tried skyr for the first time, and found out that it is available in local grocery stores. Will so be looking for it when we go grocery shopping later this afternoon! Yum!

This afternoon we are finally going to see the Hobbit. It will be interesting to see if I can manage to keep from twitching about differences between the book and the film, given that I have read the book so many times since I was a kid, and the most recent reading was in Swedish the first half of this year, and I also read it out loud to lord_kjar the summer of 2012, so it is all quite fresh in my mind.

I woke up this morning from a dream wherein I was out for a walk with a bunch of people, but it was so damned hot we all sat down in the shade of a bus stop and quit walking, because we couldn't be bothered moving any more. I could see snow on the mountain peaks looming over us, but it was so hot where we were I couldn't muster the energy to go to the snow, though I really wanted to. When I woke up I realized that it really was hot under my doona; no wonder I couldn't move. I wonder if they sell feather doonas in town, or if we have to go back to IKEA (two hours drive to the north of here), where we bought this one. They had lighter weight versions available, but at the time a warm one sounded good.

The dream: I had been visiting a friend of mine (who in reality lives here in Milan) in Germany, about a 30 minute short flight north of Seattle. The day had arrived that I was due to fly back to Seattle, where mom would pick me up from the airport. Suddenly I realized that since I was flying RyanAir I needed to print my boarding pass, but my friend didn't have a printer. So we decided to go out looking for a print shop, figuring that it would be cheaper to pay the cost of printing at a print shop than to pay the €40 the airlines would charge to print the boarding pass at the airport. We left his house (which, incidentally looked *nothing* like the apartment he lives in here in Milan) and got into a small (4 seater) plane and took the five minute flight over the water to a city in Russia. The tiny airport terminal (about the size of the airport in Kotzebue, Alaska) we arrived at had an internet connection, so I checked in for my flight and created the boarding pass. Then someone asked when my flight was going to depart, and I managed to actually focus on the writing on the boarding pass (does anyone else have problems reading in their dreams? It seems like it is always difficult to get my eyes to focus on text when I am dreaming) which said that my flight was departing at 15:00, but it was already 17:00, and I was a bit confused, because I thought that I was supposed to fly in the evening, not during the day. So then I started trying to find a good deal on another flight to Seattle, this time from Russia, knowing that with the change in location it would be a 40 minute flight instead of a 30 minute one. I woke up before finding the next flight, but I did have the sense that it wasn't a real problem (other than mom likely being annoyed to have gone to the airport to fetch someone who wasn't there) because I could just do this other thing instead.

I think perhaps, it might be time to check all of the various deadlines I've got on my plate, to see if I'm forgetting anything I should be doing...

I woke up from a dream this morning which I suspect having been influenced by having spoken with my friend, Samuiel, about his work in the very early stages of Obama's campaign.

In the dream I was "reading" a geology magazine (the sort that the big geological societies publish on a monthly basis which contain articles on the state of the science and the interactions between science, politics, and popular culture, not the scholarly research based journals). This one, however, involved moving pictures, and sounds in a bewildering blend--as my eyes skipped from one article to another, the sounds switched to the next article, as did the moving pictures. The article which was before my senses just before I awoke was someone high up in that particular geological society (no idea which one, or if it was even a real one or existed only in my dream) who was explaining that he felt that it was high time that the Oval Office be inhabited by a geoscientist, and that he was prepared to dedicate his efforts in coordinating the grass-roots campaign necessary to ensure that Obama's successor after two terms in office would be a geologist, as that was the only hope our planet had in stemming the tide of human-caused damage.

At that point I was woken up abruptly by a leg-cramp (which is probably why I remember the dream at all). I'm not really clear if the geologist who was speaking in the article was proposing himself, or another geologist for the office...

I woke up this morning to a phone call from clovis_, who, being out camping this week at the Falls Festival, is waking up with the morning sun on the tent. As a result I can remember the weird dream I was having. In the dream a small group of us were trying to walk from our cabin to another destination (I knew were we were going in the dream, but I don't recall now). Our path involved walking down a valley between a couple of hills through some widely spaces Australian trees. Suddenly, our path was cut off by what, in the dream, we called an "oil spill", but we understood it to be oil that was leaking out of the ground. Now, when I say "leaking", I actually mean that our path was impeded by a two meter wide torrent of black liquid, flowing as rapidly as water, even though we knew it was an oil/tar combination. As we stopped walking to discuss if we should, perhaps walk around the hill to the left (from whence the flow originated) to get where we were going (since, although we couldn't see the origin, we knew that it was coming out of the ground somewhere up hill--that made sense because of what we knew of the dip of the local geology. However, before we could decide upon a course of action, there was a new, louder, sound like rushing water and suddenly there was a new flow of the oil, coming straight down our valley, flowing turbulently waist-deep around us and doing its level best to knock us off of our feet. I commenced the bouncing/walking motion that one does when in deep water (or in this case oil/tar which, while sticking in an icky mess to whatever it touched, nonetheless had the viscosity of river-water), trying to get to the edge of the flow, so that we could return to our cabin, explaining to one of the others in my party (who'd asked), that we'd best try to get out, but if the flow got to the cabin too, I didn't think much of our odds for survival.

It was at that auspicious moment that the phone call came in, so I don't know if our heroes managed to get themselves to safety. However, being woken up in the middle of the dream like that did permit me to realize that there was a very real sound component to the rushing oil. I strongly suspect that the cause of that portion of the dream was someone flushing the toilet (in the next room, to the left of where I lay sleeping, and then walked to the sink and washed their hands (the sink is more "behind" where I was sleeping, since my feet point more or less that direction).

I can recall looking forward to moving so that the sound of cars driving around the bend in the road just outside my window would quit triggering dreams of being in a vehicle going too fast around a corner and not being able to control it (either because I was a passenger, or because the controls failed to respond). I hope that I haven't just exchanged those dreams for ones involving the sudden appearance of rushing water. Though it is funny how someone like me who is hard of hearing, and never notices the sounds of traffic or flushing toilets (even when I'm wearing my hearing aids) when awake manages to incorporate those sounds into her dreams.

All I did today whcih resembles Uni work was attending a special seminar on the topic of converting our PhD research into publishable papers. A very useful, and informative session. After explaining the importance identifying a selling point and writing a title for the paper whcih will catch the eye and inspire folk to read it, she asked us all to come up with a title for a paper we could do from our research. I was the first to volunteer, and the group made many suggestions as to what could be done to make it a better title and what was wrong with it. Then a couple of other people shared their drafts, and the suggestions got even better, so that they wound up being given good titles they could use. (one of the people who came along to help out with the seminar was the guy in the department who's been cited more times than anyone else, and has published in journals like Science and Nature, more than once--the lady running the seminar told us that most scientists go their entire careers without ever getting an opportunity to publish in those journals. Needless to say, his suggestions were very good!)

After the seminar I came home and took a nap. I am so looking forward to moving. Having a house right on a country road does interesting things to one's dreams--the sounds of cars zooming by around the bend (they are *supposed to slow down to 60 Km/hr in this neighbourhood, but not all of them do) has me often dreaming that I'm in a car, going too fast around a curve in the road, and either someone else is driving so I can't control it, or, if I'm behind the wheel nothing happens when I try to steer or press the breaks. This won't be an issue once we move in with clovis_t's parents. Their house is set well back from the road, and it is a dirt road, so the traffic isn't as fast or as loud, and the house is double-brick, so outside sounds don't come inside as much. After the nap the day just sort of drifted by with no further uni work save for reading my 1000 words from the geologic literature. Shame on me. Yet, I think I enjoyed the day...

I think that someday I want to live someplace without a street just outside my window. Living on the side of the mountain as I do, in a little pocket of neighborhood surrounded by stretches of woods (or bush as they say down here), the cars tend to drive past at a good clip. Yes, they are meant to slow down to 60 km/hr, and some of them even do, but between their velocity and the curve in the road, there is plenty of sound (including Doppler effect!) when they drive past, and while I often fail to notice it during the day, the sound does seem to influence my dreams!

I think it might be nice to not wake up regularly from dreams wherein I am in some sort of vehicle that is moving and I can't control the movement! Some days it is a car I'm driving, and despite pressing my foot heavily on the breaks, it isn't stopping. Some days I'm in one of those amusement park rides which are like tiny open top trains, hurrying along and around some bend in the track.

Yesterday's dream was really interesting though. I had been walking along a trail along the bank of a small creek, heading up stream, when I came to a place where the water level was high enough that the trail itself was covered and there was just a bunch of (large) debris from a recent flood episode leaning up against the smooth rock face. Undaunted, I scrambled up into a tree, to get above the large logs that were jumbled up at the base of the cliff, intending to move from there to the next tree and so on, to get past the blockage. When suddenly, the tree in which I was perched (legs and arms wrapped around the trunk, in much the same position as my sleeping body was wrapped around my body-pillow) broke free of where it had been moored, and begun drifting down the river (which somehow had gotten to be a good-sized river, not the small creek along which I had been walking, dreams are like that!), the tree still upright, so that I was riding along a good four feet above the water level. Although I happened to have a large branch from another tree in my left hand, attempts to use it as a pole to guide my progress into the correct channel on my way back down the river didn't work; the water flowed relentlessly (and noisily) on, carrying me into the channel in which I *knew* there was a waterfall up ahead. But then, suddenly, I was sitting down somewhere else talking to someone else about how they had managed to go over that fall riding a tree and without getting hurt...