It has been an interesting week. I have had a lot of moments of reflection. I feel bad because it does make me a bit more aloof and since Christy does not understand this, she gets worried. I hate to worry my baby, I honestly do. There has been something on my mind since last week that I really can't disclose here as of yet. It could the silliest thought ever or it could be something more substantial, I really don't know. I am not necessarily worried or in fear of the future, I am just lost in thought. It's my natural tendency to map my world out before me to reduce any unneeded surprises. That's not to say I don't like being surprised, I love it. I just want to get a handle on what is to come so I can be more proactive than reactive. I think we all have that tendency unless we just like being flotsam and jetsam in the river of life. I have a bit of an odd twist on this concept and I will disclose why now.
The first time I can remember having issues with what I will call my condition was the second grade. One day my teacher, in a bit of fun, asked what we all thought we would be doing that day. I rose my little hand and gave her a laundry list of what I knew we would be doing that day. Big mistake. She accused me of opening and looking at the stuff in her desk before class and swiftly sent me off to the principal's office. Before I was almost dragged practically kicking and screaming out the door, I tried to explain: I had a dream about it and that's how I knew.
Of course, when I got a chance to tell the principal (I was very insistent), he rolled his eyes and sent me right back to class. What did we do in class? Exactly everything I said we would do. By the way: the teacher's desk was locked because that's where she kept everything she took from the kids that they weren't supposed to have in class. I am not sure why the woman insisted I was some type of nefarious second grade mastermind whose only mission was to discern lesson plans. Maybe my second grade education was lacking because of such failures in logic on the part of my teacher. I remember hating her after that because in my second grade brain I thought I should be rewarded, not punished, for being so astute. I am still pissed about it.
Now before we go any further, I am not trying to profess to being a psychic. I do get certain feelings about things but I can easily discount those by merely explaining them away with the mind's unconscious ability to extrapolate future events. We all do it. "I have a feeling this won't happen." etc. Every famous psychic I have ever watched uses this in a different way by using the cardinality of assumptions. They ask questions without seeming to and then take that information and seek out more information through people's own unconscious body language. As much as we try, it is hard to hide subtle body language. It's something magicians and mentalists have used for years. I used to love doing a trick where I could guess which card you were thinking of by merely asking a very small handful of questions. If I was good at reading you and forcing my idea upon you I could do it with the first card almost every time. I could easily do it in print if you had no clue I was doing it. But I digress.
I may not believe in psychics but I do believe in a deeper wave, something intangible that binds us all together as human beings. I also believe that we can tap into this but it takes extraordinary feelings or events to do so. My favorite illustration of this is the anecdotal evidence of a telepathic connection between twins. The skeptic in me says that these tales of telepathy might not always be true or accurate but I think when people do tap into something bigger than themselves it can't be easily explained away as some sort of psychological wishful thinking either.
When someone in my family says something to the effect of, "I had this odd dream...", my ears prick up. I listen to everything they have to say. On a normal daily basis, I believe dreams are nothing but your brain rearranging and feeding back what you observed or thought during the day. But sometimes, I think the brain interlaces or rearranges all of this information into something much more meaningful. A noted psychologist once talked about things or symbols repeatedly showing up around us in our daily lives but our minds did not have the ability to perceive what these things or symbols meant. A great example was the noted mathematician Pascal, he repeatedly noticed fish or symbols of fish wherever he went one day. Jung called it Synchronicity. I beg to differ with Jung. I think we can and do interpret these little hints but only occasionally expose something deeper and more meaningful. It's instinctive to certain humans and such innate instincts can be easily observed in everything from a newborn's smile to a puppy knowing how to walk.
I have had quite a few of my little dreams (or nightmares) throughout the years bear fruit. For some reason, I always remember the disastrous ones.
When I was 18, I moved away from where I went to high school the day after I graduated. I left behind the place I called home, my friends and my high school sweetheart all at the same time. With all apologies to my fantastically beautiful wife, I did love my high school sweetheart so. My wife turned out to be my true high school sweetheart, however, and oh how I love that woman.
I have to tell you, I was a wreck that summer. My high school love and I wrote each other everyday (the letters were more the along the size of novels) and called whenever it was allowed before long distance calls were practically free. I planned throughout the summer to go back and see her. I ached as only an eighteen year old could. A couple of months went by and then I had a dream. It was an awful dream. In my dream, my girl was goofing around in the front yard of her house when two guys drove up. I had never seen these guys in my life but she seemed to know them. They asked if she wanted to go with them to hang out and see a movie and she agreed, crawling in between them in the front seat of the car. The guys made lurid comments to her and she laughed them off but I could kind of tell what they were thinking since one of them said they had driven almost 40 miles to get there and kept saying it. They went and got some ice cream after the movie, then they dropped her off as it approached dusk. It was bizarre how real it all seemed. It was bizarre how upset I was about it all at the time. Oh the subtleties of the teenage heart.
The next morning I planned to call her but anguished over how I would even broach the subject of my dream the night before. When I finally did make the call, I said my normal I love you and whatnot but my voice was shaky and rapid. "You sound odd, what's up?", she said. "Oh nothing," I replied, "I just had this really weird dream last night." She paused and said, "Really? I hope it wasn't a bad one, what was it about?" Then I told her- in detail.
She was yelling with anger over the phone albeit defensively, "How could you have your friends follow me? Who was it? Was it Matt? Was it Paul?" I sheepishly and honestly told her no one had told me a thing. I immediately felt ashamed for thinking or dreaming what, in my mind at the time, was the worst. Besides, why would I ever ask someone to do such a thing? Moreover, why the hell would Paul or Matt waste their summer in such a way since she lived in the boonies? What I was being accused of was downright creepy and completely illogical. I tried to explain how odd she was to think this way. Then she dropped the most important question of all, "Well then, how did you know exactly what I was doing yesterday?" And there it was. It was soon all over, finito, there was no way I could ever explain that I was not some sort of teenage creep or master spy. Her connection to that deeper wave must not have been as good as mine because in her parting letter she predicted that I would grow up to have some low end job and live in a trailer. Ha! I wish!
Sometime in my late 30's I asked my dad if he had ever had odd dreams that seemed to predict things. He looked at me funny and said, "Yeah and I bet your sister does too. Just don't tell anyone about it, they might think you're nuts." That was about it. End of conversation. He confirmed what I thought but that was as far as he wanted to go. My father and I have a pretty good relationship but there are some things you know to let go of. I haven't it brought it up since.
Well Christy has had a dream and I have had a very similar one with very odd feelings and premonitions about it all. It might all pan out to nothing, you never know. What is funny about these telepathic or predictive dreams is that you never know what they were trying to tell you about until it actually happens. That makes them more of a source of amusement than anything else. We'll see. It could just be some mutual fear or desire manifesting itself and we can have a good laugh about it, either way, at some later date. Fate is a fickle thing.
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I love how musicians take old folk rhymes and change them into something else entirely. The Beatles did it with Golden Slumbers and Lady Madonna and Bowie does it here. There are a slew of other songs derived from the following poem performed by the likes of Van Morrison and The Monkees, as well. Now here is the old superstitious poem that Lady Madonna and today's song were based. Supposedly the poem takes what day you were born on and explains what it portends for the future. What child are you? (I am Sunday's child)
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
You know how I know you're gay?
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