I will dream?

 

Will I dream?

That line is from 2010: A Space Odyssey” where Dr. Chandra is shutting down HAL, in an effort to see if he can reactivate HAL 9000 (2001).  HAL allows this process, only after asking that question.

 

At that time of the 1970s, computers were bulky machinery that filled a gymnasium. Then my computer seemed unfathomable and certainly something unattainable.

But here its relative sat, on my desk in front of me.  It did not have independent, self-created-as far as I knew.  But it sure had strong will, destructive will, as I discovered back in mid-December.

Have you ever seen that dreaded black screen with squared white letters telling you that your computer has inexplicably shut down?  Over and Over?  If you have, then you are nodding your head at this very minute. 

 

That happened to me on December 20, 2012.  So long ago.

My computer had been in the shop, and then returned to me clean and humble.  Will it last?  I don’t know.  But I wonder, as it sat on the work table with other broken computers, did it dream?

If it did, it had nightmares, terrible destructive nightmares.

 

 When my brothers died, I dreamed of them.  Odd dreams mind you, but I was close to them.  Robert was my age, born in January 1951, and I was born in December 1951. He died in 1997 from a horrible brain tumor.

 

Bill died in in 1999, at age 44. His death was the result of septic poisoning after back surgery.

 

Their dreams were about faith and death. Mom said that Robert told them as they drove him to the hospital that he was going to see Jesus that day. I know that he did, God confirmed that to me.

 

Bill? The day before his surgery he called me. He told me that he was ready to die, if that was what God willed for him.  

 

Trust, faith, eternal life and believing is what we were promised. God always keeps His Promises.

 

 

 

 

 Even to a computer?

 

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W. B. Yeats

Jupiter and Orion Shine

Had I heaven's embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Slideshare.net

Dream Cycle

Source: needanewname

Almost every morning we wake up, one of us will say “I had the weirdest dream last night…” and then talk about it.  Somehow as the day wanders by, the details of the dream fade away until the dream becomes a pale ghost of colors and people.

I always have “Teacher” dreams. The dream always includes having a huge number (60? 100?) of students with me as the only teacher.  The classroom is a crumbling building, bricks and rubble lying around.  We can hear the sounds of wild animals and shouting.  Other teachers I know are walking by with cups of coffee and laughing.  Then suddenly I revert to being a student-teacher, with no clue how to teach.

Everyone dreams, at least that is the accepted idea.  We dream to relieve stress…we dream to solve problems unsolved when going to sleep…we dream to face our fears… I guess those are all accurate.

My dreams seem to dredge up memories of events in my life, but twisted somehow.  All the anxiety of those times get magnified and blown up, increased to be beyond solving.

What about you?  Do you have a recurring dreams, one that the theme is always the same, the problems as well?  Is anything ever resolved?

...Then he met Samuel: Cowboy Bob

Dreams

When Robert Lewis Sherman was a child with wide-open eyes, he knew this: He would be a cowboy named “Cheyenne”, spit whenever he felt like it, and wear a Stetson low on his brow.  He would gnaw on a tooth-pick, kick doors open, and drink strong bitter coffee.

When he turned 21, his eyes were mere slits and he trusted no one, believed in no one, and growled at everyone.  Robert “Bad Man” graduated from Berkeley with great expectations.

Now Robert “Loner” Sherman worked at a Wal-Mart at the Optical department where he was an optometrist, a surprise to his family and especially to himself.  

The only connection he had now to his cowboy dream was a pony named “Shaggy” he had adopted and kept stabled at a nearby ranch.  

 His Saturdays were spent in two ways:  grooming Shaggy, and/or making extra cash at kids’ birthday parties as “Cowboy Bob” with his wily pony whose stage name was “Thunder”. 

Oddly, those were the happiest hours of his endlessly mind-numbing days.

Then came Samuel and his damned third birthday…

Y is for...YELL

Arlee Bird has a blog site on which he discusses dreams and possible interpretations.  I dedicate this post to him.

“Y” is for Yell!

I taught school for twenty years as a second career.  One of my personal mandates was that I did not raise my voice.  I did not yell in the classroom, unless it was part of reading aloud and the character was yelling. 

Doris Day, oh how I wanted to be you!

Oh, I would yell on the playground.  “Get OFF that FENCE right NOW!”

This almost looked like me, so long ago....

I have this recurring dream in many variations.  With a herd of forty students, I am guiding them on a field trip through some hazardous place.  Why we would go to a minefield or an African savannah, I don’t know, but we are there and I am charged with keeping these students safe.

Don't go there! I warned you...

There are always a number of students who wander off the path that we must stay on or dire things will happen. 

They might look cute...no!...don't...

When I see them at the back of the line, I cannot get to them in time.  So I must yell at them, “Stop right there...”

Only I can’t yell.  No matter how hard I try, I cannot yell.  Finally I manage it…and I wake myself up yelling. 

“You okay?” asks my husband.

On Teaching

I loved teaching, still love teaching.  When my health said it was time to stop, I turned away from the classroom.  I now have two granddaughters whom I love without end.  Still, I miss the classroom, the eyes of the students as they learn. 

The eyes never change.   

In the twenty years since my first group of students, I may not recognize them, but they recognize me.  

 When I see the eyes, I can call up the child-face these adults once had.  Suddenly we are talking about their lives and what they are doing as adults.  Some have children holding their hand, some are going on to school.  I don’t tell them about me, my life goals, because I am not and never was the important one:  the students were all that mattered to me.

Almost every night I have a dream about teaching.  Some are great, where we are on the playground or we are reading a grand book.  Others are not. 

In those dreams, the teaching situation is desperate, the classroom is an abandoned rotting shell of a building, and the students are scared.  So am I.  There are so many students with all sorts of needs and we don’t have enough books to go around.  Whatever learning happens is up to the teacher, because there is no other source.  I see their eyes looking at me, waiting, and that is when I do something.

Bolivia Road of Death

I never get to find out what I do, for the dream morphs onto something like driving a school bus along that most dangerous road in Bolivia.  Then I wake up.

It all comes down to the teacher and the quality he/she brings to the classroom.  Money can be thrown at the needs of the schools, but if the teacher does not have the freedom to teach, nothing will happen.
  

e ceiling, reams of lined paper can line the walls, and sharpened pencils can lie in laundry baskets.  

But, if the teacher does not have the freedom to explore and fulfill the needs of each student, learning will dwindle to the bubbles on Scantron™ test papers. 

What Dreams May Come

“What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?”

courtesy of Bing.com

This is from Hamlet, and is one of the few lines I can remember from high school English class.  It was an enigmatic line to me then, being all of fifteen years old, and having seen little of life or death.

Now, of course, that has changed.  Life and death—those are much more real to me.  You might be expecting me to expound on death and how it surrounds us all.  Nah, I want to share dreams of life with you.

I taught first through eighth grades over a twenty year span.  I restarted my teaching career when my youngest child began second grade.  By that time, I was almost 37 years old, with a load of life experiences in my backpack that most of the younger teachers could not have had.  My first class was a fourth grade class whose teacher had to take sick-leave mid-year.  Up to the time I came, there had been 18/eighteen different substitute teachers who went and left after one day. 

It was a rough class, a broken class.  More than that, it was a group of 10-11 year old children who felt abandoned in the one safe place where they could count on being cared for and taught what they needed to know. 

Not an endorsement--but it looks good.

God knows what we all need, and He certainly knew what these children needed: someone to love them, to slug it through, to stay the course with them. 

To say that we endured and came out winners would be too light-hearted.  It was a struggle, almost mental hand-to-hand combat.  Each child had their own issues of pain, divorce, poverty, gang-pressure, and abandonment from home.  They needed—no, they absolutely were desperate for someone to hold onto and to show them the door to a better world. 

Teachers must be warriors for their students.  I was a soft mother type, who made quilts and baked brownies, who taught Sunday school and played the church piano.  But I was also a tenacious and stubborn woman, who saw into the hearts of these hurting kids.  It was a daily test for all of us, and in the end, we were drawn together.  On the last day of school, we were all teary eyed to see school end and our relationship to change. 

Months before, I had entered that classroom as their adversary, another teacher whom they thought would leave them.  My promise was that I was staying, and they were not going to be left with someone else.  I kept my promise. 

Now, I have dreams of my students, over 600 of them, in different situations with me as their teacher.  Sometimes I am driving a bus on a field trip along a crazy Bolivian mountain road.  Sometimes we are in a classroom put together in a bombed out bunker.  In other dreams, teacher friends and I are going to somewhere like Haiti to set up classes for other abandoned children. 

Dreams indeed. 

Closures and Openings

courtesy of Bing.Com Free Photos

One of the saddest things to see is an “OUT of BUSINESS” sign on the window of a store I have shopped in many times.  It used to be something normal, such as the owners moving out of state, or the owner wants to retire.  Now, the sign is about some action anonymously hidden.

Even worse are the “Clearance!  All Must Go!”, along with “Store Closing!  Everything 20% off.!” Then the percentage number slowly slides higher…30%...50%...70%.  The signs are on the windows for such a long time, that I become immune to their invitation.  Then, suddenly, the store is closed, and paper covers the insides of the once gleaming glass walls.

Courtesy of Bing.com free photos

I suppose that puts me in the highly-sensitive category (HSP), where I empathize with the hopes and plans of the owners when they first started the business.  When sales were high, the owners and the employees must have joked with each other between customers, had donuts in the staff lounge, and good coffee.  As the percentage signs went up, the air must have darkened inside, broken only by the buzzing fluorescent bulbs high over the sales floor.  There probably was no laughter, no conviviality.  The employees must have glared at each other, wondering who will be next to go.  No donuts, no coffee, and they must have raced each other to the door to get home, to look for another job.

This was someone's home.

Everyone has to go through a closure of some sort in their lives.  It is important to remember the following:

Closure of any kind is a cruel animal, which can prey on anyone.   Just don’t let that animal eat away at you, and make you forget how wonderful you are, how marvelously loved you are, and how tomorrow will provide something for you.  Closure of a love, of a life, of an opportunity, of…any kind can take away something, but you can gain more by letting that closure silently retreat behind you.

Hope springs eternal!

Some day soon, the paper will be peeled off the windows, and new lights will turn on inside those stores.  Someone with a dream and a hope will jump in with both feet to create a place that customers will want to visit, and find many things to buy.  That is when the sign on the door will read OPEN and Come on in!.

                                        

V is for

There are places I plan to visit, beautiful places.  The National Geographic shaped my mind to desire to see these places for myself. 

I must go to Yellowstone National Park.  I don’t have to see Ol’ Faithful geyser, but I must see the mountains, the buffalo, and breathe the pine scented air. 

I must go to Mount Rushmore, where someone with a great vision of what could be carved into granite and produced the faces of some of America’s most honored presidents. 

I must go to Alaska, and gaze at ancient glaciers, listening to iceberg size pieces ‘calving’. 

I probably will manage trips to these amazing natural wonders God created.

But, being greedy, I will wish for one more, knowing that I will never ever go there:  Victoria Falls in Africa.  Why won’t I go there?  Well, I really do not enjoy plane travel, and Africa holds too many questions for me to feel safe, at this point of my non-adventurous soul.  But, still I will always wonder about Victoria Falls.

After writing about “UP!” in the previous blog, it is natural for me to think about Victoria Falls, I suppose:  V is for Victoria Falls. 

 To hear the thunderous roar of the water, to feel the spray of the mist rising up from the gorge, to follow the rainbow to its end--these things I will dream about some quiet night.

Thank you, Arlee Bird and your team.

Please check the link below to see what other bloggers dream about when considering the letter "V".

http://tossingitout.blogspot.com