In Mourning

My hometown was paralyzed Friday, December 14th. I'm still feeling a bit paralyzed myself, grieving as I would someone I knew personally. This was an anonymous poem I received in an email and I feel I need to share it too.

"Twas' 11 days before Christmas, around 9:38

When 20 darling children stormed through heaven's gate,

Their smiles were contagious, their laughter filled the air,

They could hardly believe the beauty, of all that they saw there,

They were filled with such joy, they knew not what to say,

For they remembered nothing, of what happened earlier that day.

"Where are we?" asked a little girl, as quiet as a mouse,

"This is heaven." said a boy. "It's Christmas at God's house,

"When what to their wondering eyes did appear,

But Jesus, their savior, and the babes gathered near,

He looked at them and smiled, and they smiled just the same,

Then He opened forth His arms, and called them each by name,

In that very moment, was joy that heaven will bring,

Those children all flew into the arms of their gracious King,

And as they lingered in the glow of His warm embrace,

One small girl turned and looked right into Jesus' face,

Then as if He could read all the questions she had,

He gently whispered to her, "I'll take care of Mom and Dad".

Then He looked down on earth, the world so far below.

He saw and wept for all hurt, and all the deep sorrow,

He closed His eyes and He outstretched His hand,

"Let My power and presence re-enter this land!"

Then He and the children stood up without a sound.

"Come now my little children, let me show you all around".

Excitement filled the space, some skipped and some ran.

All displaying exuberant joy that only a child can.

And I heard Him proclaim as He walked out of sight,

"In the midst of this darkness, I am still the light."

Daymares and Nightdreams

So I guess a few of you have probably been wondering whats the deal. I said I'd be back to normal, but alas, I spoke too soon. I apologize for the lack of content it seems I've needed a kick in the pants to get it together. This fall has been a bit of an odd time for me... I've never had nothing to do for so long that the lack of scheduled activities has turned me into quite the couch potato. Sadly, I've been overindulging in social media (still addicted to twitter), catching up on all my fave junk TV, and mostly twiddling my thumbs.

My boredom had gotten so bad, that not only had I become a blob, I started having very vivid and strange dreams. Most of them were not so bothersome for me to remember exactly what the content was, but towards the end of October I started having this one dream repeat itself. The first one was the most shocking, very vivid. A couple days later a very similar, but my more subdued version filled my unconscious REM stage, and the following week the "product" of this dream came back to haunt me for a third time.

What was this disturbing and eerie dream, you ask? Going through labor and having a baby! For those of you who know me, you know I love babies, and I am excited to one day have one after I am married to my buddy. However, despite my "baby fever", I am in no way ready for one right now. So, as you can imagine, this was quite freaky. What do you think I did about it? To GOOGLE!!

While sitting with a group of my girlies and discussing my persistent dream-fetus, we went on a search for dream meanings. You can all relax, the meaning of the dream is not that I am pregnant. We'll hold on to that surprise for a future date and time. The meaning of the dream is actually related to creativity.

The Huffington Post interviewed a dream analyst on the subject who stated that "At its core, this dream is about creativity. Women literally create new life out of their bodies. If you dream of being pregnant, you are likely craving time to be creative, or 'dreaming up' a new and exciting creative project that will come into existence down the line. This could be as small as a home-based renovation project or a large-scale artistic work." My search did not stop there, however. Being educated in a research mindset, one source is simply not enough. Fortunately, link after link revealed roughly the same idea. Dreams of being pregnant or giving birth usually correlate to a developing idea, a new creative project, or an emotional time of growth. 

Yay for not being pregnant! And yay for realizing my boredom was the likely culprit of these dreams/nightmares. Moral of the story, if you are having pregnancy dreams... you can relax! You may be bored out of your mind and looking for creative inspiration, or you may be starting on a new endeavor and your unconscious psyche likes to play with your mind while you sleep. Despite the benign nature of these dreams, you can bet I promptly gave myself some projects to keep them away.