Dream Imagery: The Baby Skeleton

          On Friday December 18, 2009 I posted an article about dreams .  Dreams have alway held a great fascination for me since childhood and I sometimes have journaled them or at least thought about them. Rohini, who has a blog called MY WEIRDEST DREAMS ,  commented with a request that I post some dreams on my blog.  I have decided to do this on occasional Fridays since I try to post about mysteries and mysterious things.  Dreams certainly fall into the category of the mysterious.  I am hoping that my blog friend Dr. Harris Stern will be there to lend his very astute observations about dreams.  Dr. Stern has also posted some fine articles about dreams.

         As I had mentioned in my December article, dream symbolism is very personal and can vary from one person to the next or even in our own dreaming life from one dream to the next.  Sometimes the meanings can be very concrete and they are exactly what has been envisioned in the dream.  Other times what we see in our dreams symbolizes something else entirely.  I don't think we can read a dream account in most cases and completely understand it because we need to know a lot more background about the dreamer's past and current situations.  But we can dabble and play around with it.

        The dream I am going to present today is one that I call THE BABY SKELETON .  This is a dream that I had when I was between 9 and 12 years old.  It was so vivid that I remembered it to the extent that it became a favorite story that I used to tell my kids when they were growing up.  Now you can enjoy the story and perhaps even play psychoanalyst.

         To begin with I will provide some background information as I recall it.  During the time of this dream it would have been between 1959 and 1963.  My family was living in a sprawling new housing development on Clairmont Mesa in San Diego, CA.  Our home was a block away from the large undeveloped Tecolote Canyon.  As children my sister, my friends, and I would often spend much of our non-school time playing in and "exploring" the canyon.  Bear in mind that this was a time when kids had a much greater reign to roam without some of the fears we have today.  We would often wander the canyon imagining that we were discovering things.  A bird feather was a remnant of a past Indian tribe, an unusual stone was an artifact of some primitive culture, or a dirt road was a pioneer trail.  We were full of imagination and adventure.

        Life seemed pretty simple and unthreatening to us children despite the news reports about possible attack from the Russians and the duck-and-cover air-raid drills that we would sometimes practice at school.  My family led a pretty routine suburbia life, my parents were just normal good parents, my sister Joy was one of my best friends, and my twin brother and sister were still very young.  I enjoyed watching THE TWILIGHT ZONE and scary movies on television and my reading primarily consisted of The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift.  Stamp collecting was my main hobby.  Life was good.

        In my dream I am in the canyon with my sister and perhaps some other friends.  We are exploring like we normally would be doing.  We are in what I would presume to be the western part of the canyon not far from the school where we attend, James Whitcomb Riley Elementary School.  Our group is following a trail on the eastern slope of that part of the canyon.  We come upon some ancient ruins that are much like Greek or Roman ruins.  Stone buildings are crumbling and fluted columns that are broken in pieces lay on the ground.  I am very excited that we have found such an amazing place in the canyon.  As I explore the site looking for artifacts, I find something about 20 inches long that is wrapped in an old blanket.  Unwrapping the parcel I find that it contains the skeleton of a baby.  I am very excited and feel that I have found something that is very special and even powerful. 

        Keeping my find a secret from my companions, I wrap the skeleton back up in the blanket and hurry home where I place the skeleton in one of my dresser drawers.  At this time I awaken, feeling very excited.  The first thing I do after I wake up is jump out of bed and check all of my dresser drawers to find the skeleton.  It's existence is very real to me in my initial wakefulness, but then I come to the realization that I have only been dreaming.   I feel somewhat sad and disappointed.

       Now it's your turn.  What could this dream have meant?   Have you had dreams that you were convinced were real when you woke up?  If you remember your dreams, I'm sure you have had dreams that have had this effect upon you.  How do dreams of childhood compare with those we have as adults?  Are you or were you a fan of TWILIGHT ZONE , The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Tom Swift?  Do you think my sister and I should have been using those canyons as a playground and wandering the neighborhoods on our own (everybody did it back then and none of us ever felt unsafe)?

A Blog Mystery & 12 days of blogs

             Before I begin my article for today, I want to take care of some business.  Tamika from The Write Worship passed this award to me,

The Heartfelt Award and that was certainly thoughtful of her to do. Be sure to visit Tamika's site if you aren't following it already.   Thank you, Tamika, for your kind recognition of my blog.

              A couple of weeks ago Journaling Woman gave me the lemonade award and I wanted to say thanks to her and acknowledge her fine blog.

         So I will bring this all together by also, at the same time, participating in the 12 days of Community challenge.     L.L. Barkat is hosting a challenge to encourage bloggers to engage in 12 days of community, featuring other bloggers on their personal sites throughout the month of December. She  suggested this on the High Callings Blog.    I may not be doing the 12 days, but I reguarly recognize deserving blogs like I am doing today.   

 

           So I'm bestowing this award to the following friends and I will do it in conjunction with recognizing some other bloggers in our community.  And the recipients are asked to pass this on to some of their blog friends so they can gain some blog promotion as well.   Here are 6 blogs that I frequent often:

Life, Uncharted     Poetry, musings, thoughts

Heim Binas Fiction    Carrie's going to talk about her stint as a child actress today-- would you miss that?

Random Thoughts     From Iowa, just what the title says it is.

Lit Diva   needs some more followers -- show that you care.

Marsha's Musings   the musings of an aspiring writer.

Beaded Bear    Sig talks about beading, but I read her for her writing. 

          Check them out and I apologize for all of the other fine blogs if I haven't given you an award yet.  There are so many writing sites that I look at everyday with so much helpful info that I couldn't list them all here, but you could always go to my profile and check out the list.



          Now to the mysteries.  Today, since I'm doing blog promotions, I''m going to recommend some blogs that probably don't want me to give them any awards, but I think they deserve to be recognized and checked out.
 
           Do any of you ever search through the blogs based on what the blogger's interests are?  I do this occasionally and come across some very fine blogs that very people seem to look at.  They have few to no followers and few to no comments.  Perhaps it's not a great mystery, perhaps they choose not to network. But why go to the trouble of writing what no one reads?

           Sometimes I run across blogs that seemed to have been going strong and then just stopped, many as far back as a few years ago.  I've never really investigated to see if there are any clues as to why they stopped.  Did they lose interest?  Did they die?  I'm sure it's frustrating to some who want to be read to keep posting and never get any comments.  I guess some people just lose interest in their blog and stop posting entries.

           Do you get discouraged about blogging sometimes?  I admire the persistance of those who stay with their blog even when they don't believe anyone reads.  And I admire those who read the blogs and put in their comments, even if it's just a few words of encouragement.  On my Thursday blog I was very impressed by those who stopped by and left very substantial comments.   Thanks to all of you --my gratitude is no mystery. Some of you good readers might like to go back to read those comments-- they  are quite good. Feel free to leave yours as well.

So in closing here are three sites that I enjoy and I hope more people go to check out:

http://who-am-i-who.blogspot.com/     Dr. Harris Stern, a psychologist from Philadelphia blogs about writing personal memoirs. I like his concept but I wish he would get some more followers to encourage him to post more. 

http://stephentmccarthysstuffs.blogspot.com/           I keep trying to tell people about Stephen because he's the one that got me into blogging and I'd like to see him get more readers and commenters. Don't let his sometimes seemingly cynical (realistic? honest?) view of things scare you away. I think he's a really clever writer with a unique sense of humor and he deserves to be read. He's been doing this blogging thing for a few years now.  He's really a smart guy who makes me think and teaches me a few things.     Maybe I'm kind of weird, but that's what I think about that.

http://whatatholwrote.blogspot.com/       This is Athol Dickson's blog which I discovered when I did my interview with him that appears on my blog post for Wednesday 12/9--if you haven't read the interview please check it out and leave a comment. He's a great author and we writers should give him the recognition he deserves. He doesn't post often of late, but after all he's a full time novelist and he's got a lot of other writing to do.

            There you go.  Please do me a favor and check these last three blogs and while you're there leave an encouraging comment.  If nothing else just pop in and say that Arlee Bird sent you.  And if there's anything you don't like about these blogs let me know what it is.  If there's something you do like I then I would like to know that as well. After all, I'm still in Blog School and I'm still learning the ropes here.  I want to know what works and what doesn't.  We are a communtiy and we should be willing to help each other.

Turkey and Blog Posts for Thanksgiving

          Hope everyone had a great week. And can you believe Thanksgiving is on Thursday? Don't know why but this year it took me by surprise moreso than other years. Thanksgiving has always been a favorite day for me. This year I don't think my wife and I are going to do things up too big like we've done in past year, but we'll still have a smaller sized traditional dinner.

         The past week was somewhat odd. Perhaps I'm now feeling the pressure from trying to keep up with my NaNo novel.  I'm still at it and keeping up. I'll be providing my insight on Monday's post and talk about what roadblocks and detours I've been encountering and will look forward to hearing about how other writers, as well as in other vocations, deal with the types of things that I'll be talking about.

        Over the past several Sundays I've been doing a series about prayer and talking to God. Tomorrow's post will deal with listening to God.

        Had some fun reaction to my last week's post about toothpaste . This Tuesday I'll be getting in a Thanksgiving spirit with a post about traditional Thanksgiving fare. I'll be hoping to hear about some of your Thanksgiving favorites.

        For my Wednesday interview story I will be profiling Lonnie Carver, a professional musician who branched out into worship ministry and now acts as the worship leader at a Tennessee church. This past week's story about artist Ada Jackson got a very good response from those who left comments.  According to my tracking stats, viewership to the Tossing It Out site tripled on that day. 

        The weird one for the past week was Thursday's debate topic on the Bible in schools . I guess that old adage, “Never discuss religion or politics in polite company” is pretty true.  Not many of you seemed to want to touch that one, although I was pretty impressed by the substantial comment contributions from two favorite bloggers, Carrie Kei Heim Binas and Stephen T. McCarthy . I would encourage you to go check that post and the commentary as well--and certainly feel free to add more comments.  Perhaps this Thursday I'll try to avoid the overly controversial and get silly. Let me know if you think I get off-base with some of my topics.

         Yesterday I had another post about death stories.  They were not morbid stories, just ironic stories. One of the comments on this post was left by psychologist Harris Stern who has an interesting blog called Who Am I? Who Are You?  .  Harris has some interesting posts about death, as well as telling life stories. He also has a website that you may enjoy http://www.supportforchange.com/ .


         So what are you doing for Thanksgiving? Do you have a long-standing tradition that you'd like to tell us about?  What was your most unusual Thanksgiving? What are you thankful for?
 
                   Have a Happy Thanksgiving!