I went to bed rather early last night around 10:00. I had a very active weekend in a number of ways and found myself pretty well exhausted physically and mentally by that time Sunday night.
I actually remember thinking to myself that like a computer, that after heavy activity, begins to have some “file and program” processing issues, I knew I needed a good restart and reboot for Monday. As I turned off all the lights in various rooms and prepared for sleep, like most nights, I glanced around at the plethora of projects in process and things I didn’t fully accomplish in my long, long days…thinking to myself some combination of this is too much, I am too much, I am not enough and what dreadful thing might happen next…
On some nights I do feel satisfaction in all I’ve accomplished and think, it is enough…you have done all possible today…rest…but that wasn’t my thinking last night…
__________
I know that dreaming is a valuable process in human consciousness and the means by which we sort through and problem-solve things from our waking days. I can’t recall now what it was, but several years ago I actually went to bed mulling over some specific problem in some art piece, I believe, and literally dreamed how to solve it during the night and woke up with recollection of the idea. That was unusual.
While I do experience and believe that sometimes we may have powerful spiritual dreams that might mean something in terms of insight, warning or guidance, usually dreams are simply the re-processing and defragmenting of things from our waking psyche and daily lives.
I don’t know if it is because I am a creative person but my dream images and plots can be quite creative, imaginative, convoluted and fantastic to the point I’m not sure I can put into words what was happening! At times I’ve dreamed I’m flying like a bird or all sorts of strange stuff.
In the Bible, Joseph had quite the fantastical dreams, too.
In Genesis 37:2-10 (NIV) it says:
“Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them.
3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made an ornate[a] robe for him. 4 When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.
5 Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. 6 He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: 7 We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”
8 His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said.
9 Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”
10 When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, “What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?” 11 His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.
Later, in Genesis 42, we hear the rest of the story…
__________
I awoke around 4:15 a.m. this Monday morning, from part of what seemed like an ongoing, grueling dream filled with a lot of deeply convoluted scenes involving various people, seemingly random, from throughout my lifetime, in what seemed like odd conversations and impossible situations.
Upon waking I found myself reflecting and going over and trying to put into words, in my own mind, the scene and the emotion that actually jarred me awake.
In the dream I was sitting on top of the mammoth structure that is in my framing studio, built from two pieces of 4×8 plywood, about 4 ft tall, with a ledge around the top so I can work on bridal bouquet preservation and below there are vertical slotted sections to hold pieces of 32×40 mat board sorted according to color.
This constructed item was disassembled and moved from Delaware to the first rental house in Alabama, to the second home that my former husband and I purchased together, then disassembled and put into storage in Delaware in 2020 in a friend’s Barn, and then retrieved by U-Haul and reconstructed here in my new home and studio in East Berlin Pennsylvania.
That in itself was a lot of work and costly endeavor.
When I left Alabama a few people helping suggested I just dispose of the wood and repurchase/rebuild it later, rather than disassemble and store and reconstruct. I knew it was a toss-up since wood is expensive and the thing was already well-designed. This one daunting task represents thousands of seemingly insurmountable losses (at times) to me in my situation, and I chose to not follow that advice. I knew that even the purchase of all that Luan-board that formed the vertical dividers and fit perfectly into the grooved slots would be quite costly – let alone the work of re-measuring, re-cutting and all else involved.
As my son helped disassemble it in Alabama I was photographing and marking the pieces with numbers, and once I was here in Pennsylvania my son’s friend was helping reconstruct it from these photographs and numbering.
__________
So back to the dream…
…I was sitting on top of this thing having some strange conversation with some people in some room (or maybe even this whole thing was outdoors or on a deck, the lighting was dim I recall, and it made no real sense haha), when suddenly two people got on each end of the thing and started sliding the whole thing (with me sitting on it) across the floor!
First of all the massive weight of this with me sitting on top of it would have made this an impossibility (unless these people were like Popeye and had eaten lots of spinach!) – and I was getting really angry in the dream because I kept saying “No, stop. Stop!!!”
In my dream-mind, I was thinking they were causing me even more problems and somehow I would have to move this thing back to where it belonged.
But they kept pushing this thing 10 or 20 ft across the floor of wherever this convoluted dream was taking place and they would not listen to me. I actually remember getting pretty angry at this and saying some things I probably should not have said. If I were to identify the emotion and thoughts happening in this dream, it would be that I felt things were out of control in some sense.
It was then that I woke up and started to try to make sense of this dream because I do believe dreams express things from our psyche.
It wasn’t long before I was thinking about the word constant, because over the weekend it was something my mind came upon in context of things I was thinking about.
It wasn’t long before my mind meandered into various troubling things such as thinking about my younger son and realizing that he’s becoming absent from my dreams more and more and my daily thoughts. Right now, and for reasons that seem to make no real sense and are quite hurtful, he has chosen to sever me from his/her life and this is one more thing that brings a lot of pain and turmoil in me. I miss them and as a mother, long for them, while feeling hopeless I will ever see them again nor hear back from them.
As I lay there I became aware of my left shoulder and neck being all cramped up and as usual during the night due to arthritis and fluid swelling, I cannot close up my right hand. It does loosen up, obviously, once I start my new day.
The kink in my neck was so bad that I got my mechanical neck massager hooked up, hoping for some relief. I was awake for about 2 hours and then went back to sound sleep until around 8:30 this morning.
Usually I awake to three of the four cats surrounding me on the bed. The fourth, Sammy the black cat, is very skittish and doesn’t normally come on the bed but on occasion.
This morning the main three cats were nowhere in sight but Sammy was up on the bed attempting to interact with me. This cat is strange. Won’t let me touch him, and on rare occasion when I can grab and hold him, he does not purr, and he seems to run from me except when I have a bag of pretzels. When this happens he gets very assertive, suddenly friendly and persistent until I give him pretzels. He does not eat the pretzels, but seems interested in the crumpling of a pretzel bag. Odd.
This morning Sammy, who does on occasion purr like a normal cat, was attempting awkward head bumps on my arm and purring, and thinking that nipping at me with his teeth was good cat behavior! I did attempt some interactions with him and he kept ducking my hand and nervously moving around, smelling my arm and hand and then trying to nip at me with his teeth.
Truth be told, I’m probably anthropomorphizing and interpolating too much – this cat’s reasoning.
The animal was just plain hungry.
I thought it funny when I sat up and looked over at the window and found that Marley was laying there next to the room heater.
I then checked my weather app and yes, it is 18° here today.
I thought about the battery candle I keep in my window to remind me that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
I thought about all the things and tasks and situations before me this Monday.
And I was still thinking about the word constant.
__________
As I recall from algebra, in an equation there are constants and there are variables.
In life we have constants, and a constant stream of variables.
I attempt to remind myself in whatever ways possible that God does not change and He is my Constant, like the northern Star. (I also am reminded of an interesting talk about the “south stars” in our lives…those are the things we see and use as navigational tools of that which we don’t want as our guide…)
There are a number of other constants in my life, as well.
I look for Constants and I also create them for myself in various ways.
Just as we love because He is love and first loved us, we create because we are created by a Creator.
When God created a number of constants in succession, during the six days described in the beautiful creation poem that Genesis 1-2 is – when he made our universe, our world and eventually, humankind – he was seemingly imagining the next thing and then He created it, and then, with each thing, He refrained, “that is good!”
On most days once I get going I try to view the day as an adventure of sorts. Even when filled with heavy difficulties, you never know what might happen next!
I plug away like the tortoise (and the hare, too…) and enjoy both the comical and the contemplative…and much more…
Looking for and recognizing the constants God has created for us in so many ways and varieties is good.
And then there are the unexpected variables… the little micro-miracles of sorts, or as one friend put it once, “the God-winks.”
God-winks are the seemingly micro-experiences that are very personal, unique and some blend of what is in our heart, mind and soul intersecting with some external variable that just coincidentally happens at the most unusual time.
The witnessing of such things cannot always be put in words and requires of us either rationalization or a deepening of our faith in the mysteries of this wonderful world and existence we have found ourselves in.
And with this…I am ready to start this Monday in earnest.
I hope…ha ha…
__________
(Below…my massive table in my Alabama studio…followed by the same table here in Pennsylvania…)
My matteboard/bouquet preservation creating table here in my new dream studio here in Pennsylvania!
Thank You For Reading
Please Feel Free To Express Your Thoughts Below
