Dream a little dream with me

A beautiful purple sunset

I found this lovely picture while I was perusing Earthsky News. Graham Telford captured this sunset while he was fishing at Stainforth, a village in the United Kingdom. I subscribed to the website awhile back and enjoy seeing what's happening in the sky, and every day they have a different image to delight their readers. Between this blog and Astronomy Picture of the Day, I start every morning with a look at something that gives me perspective beyond my own little corner of the world.

Thank you to everyone who left such thoughtful comments on this blog last week. I was a little bit startled by the wonderful advice I received, since I can never predict what will come out of my fingers when I sit down and begin, as I am right now. And to have struck a chord that resonated with so many of you that caused you to open up your hearts, well I am just grateful to have found this connection with you. I am not likely to repeat the endeavor today, because now I'll be trying too hard, and that will spoil it. They come when they come, and I have to be content with that.

Tomorrow I have the pre-op appointment with the doctor who will be performing the cataract surgery on my first eye, the "bad" one that is already missing vision. Although I've researched how the surgery affects AMD (age-related macular degeneration), I know that it's unpredictable, but in most cases the effect of allowing more light into the eye helps, at least for awhile. AMD is progressive, and the sight that I've lost will not be returned. I wonder, though, if it will make the vision loss more pronounced or not. Whatever, I'll be glad when the surgery is behind me. Then I will know in no uncertain terms.

Last night I had very vivid dreams, and I woke at one point realizing that I had raised my hand to answer a question that someone in the dream had asked. It was enough to wake me from the dream, to realize that I'd actually moved a part of my body in response to a dream sequence. I've never been a sleepwalker, but I figure that must be how it works: you are fast asleep and acting out the dream. Sometimes I have awakened and realized that I was so involved in a dream that it felt incredibly real. It reminds me of a time when I had (in my dream) been laughing with my mother, one of those belly laughs that you can't help but respond to, and I laughed hard enough to wake myself up. The feeling I had from that dream stayed with me throughout the day. I found this fascinating information about sleepwalking and dreaming after a quick search:

As far as we can tell, sleepwalking occurs because two parts of the brain are "awake" at once. The first is the part that is meant to be percolating while people are asleep. It's not the part that vividly dreams. Sleepwalkers don't walk during REM sleep, but about half an hour before they enter REM sleep. The second part of the brain kept awake is the motor cortex. 

It's from a longer article called "How Can Dreams Control Your Body?" and is an interesting read. One of the reasons that it takes me so long to write these Sunday morning posts is that I keep getting sidetracked into articles like that one. At any rate, vivid dreams do seem to come to me more often when I've got something on my mind, like the upcoming surgery. Maybe it's a way I use to come to terms with it. I found a quote from Gloria Steinem that says "Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." I like that idea: that I am in the process of planning for a really good outcome. The strange thing for me about dreams, though, is their total unpredictability and inability to manage them.

That reminds me that years ago I got a book about Lucid Dreaming, which gives the dreamer some tools to use in order to direct one's dreams. I got about halfway through the book and, after trying some of the methods to direct my dreams, I lost interest. It didn't seem to work for me, although I think there are plenty of people who can make use of lucid dreaming, I'm not one of them.  For one thing, I sort of enjoy drifting off to sleep and allowing the dreams to come to me, not actually go looking for them. I don't always remember my dreams, but often enough to look forward to them. I rarely have unpleasant ones.

Although it's been years now since I've made a skydive, the experience is so ingrained in me that I often still dream about it. I suppose that having accumulated the equivalent of more than two days in freefall might explain why it actually feels comfortable to think of being there again. Sometimes I dream of flying, which is a similar feeling to freefall of being weightless and free to navigate the skies. Of course, in freefall you are also flying in a vertical perspective. Those wing suit fliers actually go farther horizontally than they do vertically. Eventually, though, they have to land, and hopefully they've got some sort of parachute over your head when they do.

I loved my pretty parachutes. I think I have owned more than half a dozen over the years, not because I wore them out, but because I was interested in trying different ones. I finally found the perfect (for me) canopy and was mostly sad when I retired that I wouldn't be flying it any more. I don't miss packing it back into the container at all. In fact, the last time I packed it, I threw my back out and realized that maybe it was time to stop. I had done everything I ever hoped to accomplish in the skydiving world, and although there are plenty of seventy-year-olds still going strong, I decided it was time for me to stop before I hurt myself.

I do still fly my parachute in my dreams, though. Now that I am a retired skydiver, those adventures still come to me unbidden at irregular intervals. Between belly laughs with my mother and zooming around in the sky under my parachute, my dreams give me plenty of enjoyment as I snuggle under the covers on cold winter nights. I do hope you will have some sweet dreams yourself.

With that,  I realize that I've accomplished it once again: I've written another blog post. This one happens to be #419. That's a lot of Sundays since I started this blog. I've enjoyed writing almost every one of them, since it gives me a chance to connect with some great people: my wonderful readers. My partner, sleeping next to me, hasn't stirred since I got up to make some tea and get my laptop. I hope he's having a wonderful dream, and I wish you many, many sweet dreams until we meet again next week.