Flying Forward

Tenby Harbour The classic view with a serendipitous visitor.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

        In my previous post I said that I would announce my intentions for A Faraway View in this current post.   Here I am as promised.  

         I guess I'll just keep this blog going for a while longer at least.   In many cases the posts might be shorter than they used to be.  Then again they could be longer.   Like I do with all of my blogging activity I'll take things as they come and write as my whims take me.

         That's a heck of a way to do things, but often life is filled with improvisation dictated by the serendipitous nature of the world.   It's kind of like the nature of dreaming I suppose.  Dreaming is often filled with twists and turns and incongruities.  That's one of the things that makes dreaming so fascinating and in many ways fun.

         In future posts I will continue to speculate on the whys and wherefores of the dream life.  I may also start digging into my dream journals to describe some of the past dreams I've had.   Some of those dreams go back to my high school years.  That's over 40 years ago!   I may also relate more recent dreams.

          In telling these dream stories I hope to keep them interesting as I know from experience that some dreams that I've heard others describe to me can be rather confusing and often boring.   Tell me if my posts get boring at anytime and provide constructive suggestions on how I can improve my posts.   And if the posts are just fine then leave whatever comments come to your mind.

           I do hope you will comment.   As with any blog post, I see many more visits to my dream posts than comments received from those visitors.   I thank my regular commenters for their loyalty to this site.  I encourage others to give me feedback or at least just let me know you visited.

          Let me know when you like something I've posted here and I'll continue to post more like it.  After all the purpose of this blog is twofold. One is to hone my own writing skills.  Blogging is writing and I hope my writing here is making me a better writer.  More importantly though my main reason for blogging on this topic  of dreaming is to exchange information and ideas.   Let's have a conversation!

         Next week I'll get back to the business of dreams.  May all of our good dreams come true.

         Do you think talking about dreams has a benefit?     Are you mostly interested in dreams for their entertainment value or for some other reason?    Do you tend to tell others about your dreams when they will listen?

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The Adverse Affect of Blogging on Dreams

Example of dark circles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

          Since I began blogging in September of 2009, more than once have I awoken in the midst of a night's sleep with a concern about blogging.   Before I learned how to pre-schedule blog posts I would just write a post and then publish it.   This lead to posts appearing randomly at various times of day.  Then I read somewhere that posts should appear on a regular time schedule.   I just had to figure out what time would be best.

          This concern about posting times began to cause me to wake up at odd hours at times.  Usually I would try to have a post completed so I could publish it as soon as I woke up.  Sometimes I would forget and remember during the night.  It was probably in dreams that I was reminded about preparing my post to publish in the morning.  Sometimes my sleep, hence my dreams was disrupted.

          The discovery of scheduling the posts to appear automatically at designated times was a boon and a blessing to my sleep time--for the most part that is.   Blogging and internet in general still frequently affects my sleep and dreams in an adverse way.

          This phenomena is comparable to dreaming about work, school, or anything that might involve a major part of our lives.   These days I spend so much of my time on the internet and doing things related to my blogs that these activities preoccupy much of my thinking both consciously and subconsciously.  I won't make any mental health judgments about this.  It's just the way things are in my life now.

         Occasionally I have awoken from a dream about blogging--usually not a troubling dream, but one that causes me to dwell upon my blogging.  The dream may be related to an idea for a post.  There are times when I have gotten up in the middle of the night to compose a post or at least lay out a considerable amount of notes so the idea would not be forgotten.  Naturally this takes away time from sleep and dreams.

         At other times I might dream about other bloggers.   This is usually not adverse I would suppose, but these dreams can create a peculiar sense of involvement with people I don't actually know.  Can such fantasies play a negative role in my perception of waking life?

           Then, as I have mentioned in other blog posts, my dreams sometimes delude me into thinking something is wrong with my blog, my computer, or some aspect of my internet life.   Sometimes I wake up confused from dreams such as these and it may take a while for me to understand that I was only dreaming.

          Probably my major concern is that blogging draws me away from sleep and dreams and I may have a compulsion to go online instead of sleeping when I should be at a state of rest.  This can result in sleep deprivation.  I often feel tired and think this may be a reason why.  Being tired, I will typically take an afternoon nap during which any dreams that I have are usually not what I would call "quality dreams" in that they don't seem long enough, they lack story and have minimal coherency insomuch that a dream can be considered to be "coherent".

           There is no good solution to this that I can think of.   And in fairness to my internet involvement, my sleeping habits do seem to be getting better of late.  Then again, maybe I'm just adapting to having the internet influence in my life.   This may just be another plight of modern existence.

            Is your sleep and dream life affected by your activity on line?  Do you think the internet can be a danger to the mind?   What are some ways that modern technology intrudes on your ability to sleep well and dream healthily?

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A Scary Halloween Dream

Jack-o-lantern (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

       This past Sunday morning I had a very scary dream.  I dreamed that my Monday post  for my Tossing It Out blog had become infected with a virus from a website that was taking over my site with links attached to key words within my post.  I was not sure where the links would lead to and I was unwilling to click on them to find out. They seemed to appear randomly and each time I fixed one, another link appeared in its place.

      The night previous to the dream I had been finishing up "My Brain is a Blog", a satirical humor post with some serious controversy that was to be a sort of lead-in to Halloween and  my Battle of the Bands post for Friday November 1.   I had some concern as to how that post would be received since it was a rather peculiar one.  This concern was probably what caused my anxiety laden dream.   This is ironic considering that the subject matter of the blog post had to do with blogging taking over the brain of the blogger, but then again having a dream with this content might make perfect sense.  The dream may have been merely a subconscious recreation of my blog post infused with my sense of concern.

       The dream seemed very real and I was believing that what had happened in the dream was something that was actually happening to my blog.  Within the dream I pinpointed the source of the problem and decided to get rid of all of the nefarious links that had been placed by an evil program that I had tapped into the night before.  I also tried to figure out how to disable the program.  Each time I tried to fix the problem I would go back to check to see if everything was okay and at the bottom of my blog post I would see the message:

          "This blog has been infected."

      In the morning after waking and rising I went to my computer to just make sure there was not an actual problem with my blog.   All was well.   The dream seemed so real that I actually believed that what had happened in the dream was a true event.   It had all seemed so convincing.

      Thank goodness it had only been a dream.

Happy Halloween!

        Have you ever had a blog dream?    Does the intensity of a dream dilemma every carry over into the immediacy of awakening so that you have to check to see if something from the dream was true or not?   What real-life related fears enter into your dream life?   

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The Chicken or the Egg

Image via Wikipedia

           Over the past week my dream life has been very active with long bouts of dreaming but little memory of the specifics of the dreams.  This lack of memory is not because I didn't have any capability of remembering, but rather due to the fact that upon awakening I immediately went about various activities without dwelling upon my dreams.  In other words, I'm quite sure that I could have recollected the dream details, but I chose not to.

             I did track the dream content over the course of the dream sleep time because I awoke almost hourly--as I am prone to do at this stage of my life--and checked to see what time it was.  Each time I woke up I was aware of the general story line of the dream and at the end of dream sleep time I was aware that the story had been a continuation of the previous dream sleep period.

            During one sleep cycle I was dreaming in great length and detail about contemporary Christian music artists and business.  There seemed to be a great deal of content that related to the church I attend, various Christian artists, and the business side of contemporary Christian music.

            On another night--or perhaps I should more accurately say morning since this is when most remembered dreams occur--I was dreaming in continued ongoing segments about blogging and things related to that activity.   These dreams continued over a period of several hours.  Nothing in particular seemed to be happening in the dream as far as action or story, but their seemed to be purposeful intent in the ongoing dreams.

            I can directly relate the influence of each of these dream sequences.  The blogging dream is obvious since I spend so much time blogging or thinking about blogging.   The Christian music dream I can connect to my waking activity of researching and writing about the topic of contemporary Christian music on the preceding day.

           One might come to the obvious conclusion that my dreams were merely recreating a dream story based on the previous day's experiences.  My mind was compartmentalizing data from my day and evaluating it before it was stored into the inner recesses of my memory.

             Then again, my dreaming mind might have been using familiar ideas to symbolically tell another story entirely unrelated to the actual activities of the previous day.  It could be that my dream was reinterpreting my preceding day to process it into something of greater relevance to the bigger picture of my life circumstance.

             Is a dream about blogging really about blogging or is it actually related to something entirely different and on a much broader scale?   If I am doing research about a topic like Christian music and writing about that topic and then later have a dream about that same topic, is the dream in reality about that topic or is it something else.

             My fault of not taking the time to evaluate the dream, write it down, and remember its details, has caused me to forget the relevance of the dream--or dreams.  Many dreams are lost in this same way.  Does it matter?   Should we be listening more carefully to our dreams and trying to understand them better?

             That might make me be inclined to ask:  What comes first?  The dream or the action?  Is the dream an interpretation of things past or does the dream prognosticate things to come by teasing us with symbolism? What is the truest state of things?  The dream?   Or that time in which we think we are awake?

            As one finds in the header blog description of one of my favorite bloggers:
“We have fallen asleep in God's embrace, having a nightmare that we are elsewhere."

            Maybe this says it all.


           

           

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