Checking in Briefly on the Eve of the New Year
I'm here in Iowa, we're staying with my wife's family. It has been a hard week, but they are such a close family you can see they're going to get through it. I have the feeling that tonight will be a pretty quiet new year's eve.
I woke up this morning in the middle of a strange dream. There was a lady in a house, but the house was kind of demolished. There was no power in the house, chunks of concrete scattered everywhere, as if the building were caving in slowly, like it had been abandoned but she didn't know it yet and still lived there. She was angry at me, yelling at me, because there was something in her house that I was trying to find. There was a hole, I think it may have been filled with water, a wet hole with harmonicas in it, and I was feeling around in there trying to find a good chromatic harmonica. I'd fish one out of there and hold it to my mouth and play a little bit of My Cherie Amour on it, and the lady'd be yelling at me, and it was never the right one, the song was never quite right. A chromatic harmonica, in case you don't know, has a button that you work with your finger, and it raises the pitch of the note one half step; a B becomes a C, for instance, and an F becomes F-sharp when you work that little button. So you can play in any key -- you can play anything once you figure out how to work it. (Most harmonicas are diatonic, and you are limited to playing songs that are strictly within one key, with no notes outside that major scale, there's no button.) The buttons on them kept slipping out from under my finger, and I was having trouble finding one that really played the song correctly, and all that time that lady was yelling at me because I was disturbing her and her house was a wreck, and also because the harmonicas never worked right. It was an interesting way to wake up.
Today there are a lot of phone calls to the house and people stopping by, but basically everybody is resting and catching up. Several people here have colds or sinus infections, and it's near zero degrees outside, probably below zero with wind chill, so we're staying in. I went out for a walk at one point, but my face was exposed and by the time I got back to the house there was no sensation at all in my cheeks.
Right now I am doing something fun, I'm reading through the blog, looking to put together a list of "best" blog posts of the year. I hadn't realized how much ground we actually covered this year, there really was a lot of stuff going on. Well, I'm up to September, maybe we'll have something in the morning. I am mostly looking at the ones that had to do with the sex-ed curriculum and related stuff, local stuff; I also am enjoying some of the off-topic ones but probably won't list them as "best" ones.
I woke up this morning in the middle of a strange dream. There was a lady in a house, but the house was kind of demolished. There was no power in the house, chunks of concrete scattered everywhere, as if the building were caving in slowly, like it had been abandoned but she didn't know it yet and still lived there. She was angry at me, yelling at me, because there was something in her house that I was trying to find. There was a hole, I think it may have been filled with water, a wet hole with harmonicas in it, and I was feeling around in there trying to find a good chromatic harmonica. I'd fish one out of there and hold it to my mouth and play a little bit of My Cherie Amour on it, and the lady'd be yelling at me, and it was never the right one, the song was never quite right. A chromatic harmonica, in case you don't know, has a button that you work with your finger, and it raises the pitch of the note one half step; a B becomes a C, for instance, and an F becomes F-sharp when you work that little button. So you can play in any key -- you can play anything once you figure out how to work it. (Most harmonicas are diatonic, and you are limited to playing songs that are strictly within one key, with no notes outside that major scale, there's no button.) The buttons on them kept slipping out from under my finger, and I was having trouble finding one that really played the song correctly, and all that time that lady was yelling at me because I was disturbing her and her house was a wreck, and also because the harmonicas never worked right. It was an interesting way to wake up.
Today there are a lot of phone calls to the house and people stopping by, but basically everybody is resting and catching up. Several people here have colds or sinus infections, and it's near zero degrees outside, probably below zero with wind chill, so we're staying in. I went out for a walk at one point, but my face was exposed and by the time I got back to the house there was no sensation at all in my cheeks.
Right now I am doing something fun, I'm reading through the blog, looking to put together a list of "best" blog posts of the year. I hadn't realized how much ground we actually covered this year, there really was a lot of stuff going on. Well, I'm up to September, maybe we'll have something in the morning. I am mostly looking at the ones that had to do with the sex-ed curriculum and related stuff, local stuff; I also am enjoying some of the off-topic ones but probably won't list them as "best" ones.
posted by JimK at 6:01 PM
2 Comments:
The Dreamer's Dictionary
I’m thinking I brought this book up here before, from what I know about you Jim, you may even own it. But this is the best dream dictionary I’ve found.
I used read them in high school, whatever I could find. I kept dream diaries, a recorder by my bed, but I could rarely if ever figure any of my dreams out. There was no practical formula to it.
A good friend of mine in Chicago interprets dreams based on the nature of the definitions in this book. Once you understand it, it’s easy, it works, and most importantly makes sense.
So there’s my shameless pitch, get the book, I highly recommend it, they make great gifts.
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Now as to your dream...
These definitions are paraphrased for relevance:
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JK: I woke up this morning in the middle of a strange dream.
There was a lady
Female: An aspect of self – In a dream, people of the same sex as the dreamer represent aspects of the conscious mind and people of the opposite sex represent subconscious aspects.
JK: in a house, but the house was kind of demolished. There was no power in the house, chunks of concrete scattered everywhere, as if the building were caving in slowly, like it had been abandoned
House: represents the dreamer’s mind [think "frame of mind"] – the activity in the house will signify how the dreamer is using this structure for thinking. Note the details about the house.
JK: but she didn't know it yet and still lived there. She was angry at me, yelling at me, because there was something in her house that I was trying to find. There was a hole, I think it may have been filled with water,
Water: Conscious life experiences. Physical water is essential to life on this planet. In the language of mind, water symbolizes the experience in the physical level of consciousness.
JK: a wet hole with harmonicas in it,
Musical Instruments: As music in a dream is harmony, instruments are the means by which this harmony is produced. One example of such an instrument is imagination.
JK: and I was feeling around in there trying to find a good chromatic harmonica. I'd fish one out of there and hold it to my mouth and play a little bit of My Cherie Amour on it, and the lady'd be yelling at me, and it was never the right one, the song was never quite right. A chromatic harmonica, in case you don't know, has a button that you work with your finger, and it raises the pitch of the note one half step; a B becomes a C, for instance, and an F becomes F-sharp when you work that little button. So you can play in any key -- you can play anything once you figure out how to work it. (Most harmonicas are diatonic, and you are limited to playing songs that are strictly within one key, with no notes outside that major scale, there's no button.)
The buttons on them kept slipping out from under my finger, and I was having trouble finding one that really played the song correctly, and all that time that lady was yelling at me because I was disturbing her and her house was a wreck, and also because the harmonicas never worked right. It was an interesting way to wake up.
Re Musical Instruments: If your dream-instrument is broken you need to add this productive quality to your thinking.
Based on what you’ve been posting lately, that seems pretty plain to me. You’ve been overly challenged of late, and you’re definitely the type of guy who would be “fishing out” what “harmony” that still exists within the “crumbling” situation.
I think I'll stop now :)
Thanks, Emproph. Besides the archetypal interpretations, there are connections to things in my life, and interconnections between things in the dream. For instance, I once had a friend back in the day who became obsessed with the song My Cherie Amour and played it constantly on the saxophone, sitting around the crashpad -- er, house that we rented. And I was in a band once where I played the chromatic-harmonica part on "Isn't She Lovely" -- and there are two Stevie Wonder connections right there. I think dreams are mysterious and interesting, I might have to pick up that book and see what I can find out.
Have a Happy New Year.
JimK
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