WEIRD?

Published December 14, 2024 by Nan Mykel

I’m not strange, but maybe a little weird. Or perhaps you do the following also, but don’t notice:

For years I have occasionally woken myself from dreaming by hearing various noises. What’s weird is that the kind of noise adheres to the place I’m sleeping. If I’m living in a house without a doorbell, the noise is knocking at my front door. If my house has a doorbell, it rings. If I have a cell phone that rings.

Once I woke to the sound of a dog in my hallway and went back to sleep, figuring it was my daughter with her dog making a surprise visit. In the morning I found the guest bedroom empty; no dog, no daughter.

Yesterday I woke to what I assumed to be my daughter’s radio alarm. I looked at my watch and it was 9 a.m. She has to be at work at 8:10 a.m., so I called out upstairs to see if she had overslept. When there was no answer I was about to go up to see if she was okay, when I saw that a sweater I had been helping her with the night before was no longer on the arm of the chair, so I relaxed.

After a few minutes puzzling, I realized that I didn’t even have my hearing aids in, so I couldn’t have heard the radio upstairs. Besides, I later discovered she doesn’t even have a radio alarm. Moreover, my short term memory surfaced and I realized I had called out “Mother!” [No wonder there was no answer?]

This dream awakening to match my living arrangements can’t be just old age, because it’s sporadically occurred over 30 years. Last time I had decided that next time I would immediately focus on what I had been dreaming, to see if there was a clue there, but I was too “out of it.”

__________________

BRIEF BRIEFS

Since I’ve already begun being frivolous, here’s something I scribbled going to sleep the other night:

When upset how do you respond?

yell___ curse____ cry____ pout____ throw things____ clam up____ scream____ drink____

snort____ eat____ sleep____ laugh____ hit yourself____ hit others____ pray____ discuss____

write____ sing____ turn on tv____ OOPS, I FORGOT: kill____ swindle___ blackmail____

self immolate____

__________________

DID YOU EVER TRY TO WRITE AN HONEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY?

If you have re-owned traits formerly projected in Jung’s Shadow, how do you handle it? How do you manage to not

sound like making excuses? Or bragging?

__________________

OH PLEASE….

Mr. Trump ultimately sued ABC, accusing Mr. Stephanopoulos of harming his reputation. Shoulda gone to Court. What reputation? The one he usually brags about?

__________________

YAY!

New Jersey’s governor just signed a law banning book bans to ensure kids can “read freely”

The Freedom to Read Act protects both the books and the librarians who curate them.

A Little Poem

Published March 31, 2022 by Nan Mykel

WANTING TO BELIEVE

On the farm, at five, I remember

both realising and regretting

that no one else could share

my experience, that each of us

is separate. I still regret it.

As a youth, at bedtime, I would

sometimes hold one arm up

in the air for minutes. Any

involuntary movement of my arm

might be by God.

One day while in college I

had a flash, a “knowing” that we

are all together in our dreams.

Hungry for connection, I still hope

for something to be true.

Nan March 2022

Waking Up Thinking

Published May 19, 2020 by Nan Mykel

The only positive thing I can think of that has come from the self-quarantine resulting from the pandemic–besides my son and I talking long distance every day–is that I’ve availed myself of the habit of waking up thinking.That is, I just lay there and think. This morning I knew I’d had a good-feeling dream but it had disappeared. I tried the process of free association to the images that came to me, and by “free associating” via images to my images I got back to my dream, which was a good one. More anon about thoughts that came to me after coffee.

I Learned Something Last Night

Published December 1, 2019 by Nan Mykel

I wanted feedback from my dreams last night so I “incubated” a dream, adding hypnogogic and hypnopompic thoughts and images (the going to sleep and waking up periods) to my focus. And I think I dreamed all night–during, before and after. But I learned that no matter how motivated, I could not record my dreams with my eyes closed, or even open while still lying down and not re-arranging myself in bed.

Day residues are easiest to recall, & the lone motorcycle in my condo’s otherwise empty parking lot (Thanksgiving, you know) clearly re-appeared in a fragment about a family next door not permitting a motorcycle to park in our own driveway.

The other dreams were fruitful, I could tell, but too many to fully record any. I do remember hearing the sound of scissors cutting. What I learned is that I must get new batteries for my old voice recorder if I want to really get serious about dreamsploring.