plague vessels

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

There are a lot of references in this dream to broken fluid vessels. I'm pretty sure that this relates to my mother, who is having some bad trouble with her arteries. The part in my dream where I imagine the red hose hanging from the roof of the building is obviously very indicative of an artery.

Just as a quick aside -- I find it odd that I "imagine" so much in my dreams. I'm always seeing things "in my mind's eye." I mean, I daydream all the time in waking life. So I suppose it's natural that I daydream in dreaming life as well. But it still strikes me as funny.

So, on the one hand, it seems like the broken vessels stand for my worries that my mom's blood vessels are going to burst. It's a scary thought, and one I hope is far from actuality.

To reinforce this idea -- I just remembered the fragments of another dream I had last night, where someone was putting plastic blood vessels in my body. But we had to go to a blood vessel store to get all the vessels we needed. The vessels all hung on display racks on the walls.

The vessels got smaller and smaller, down to capillary size. Each vessel size had a different product name. Some of the smallest vessels would be extremely tricky to put in, and putting them in the wrong way could cause me a great deal of pain or even death. I woke up considering this death.

So I can see from that dream that I was thinking of blood vessels all night long. But the strange thing about the vessels in the "black hair" dream is that they all seemed to leak gunk -- muddy gunk or maybe even fecal gunk. I think this has to do with my bad eating habits lately. I've eaten basically the same meal day after day for days now. I'm not sure why. It's pretty disgusting, though. And I'm sure my stomach hates me for it. So I think my own plumbing, so to speak, is coming back to haunt me in my dreams.

But I also think the image of the cabin, the fainting man and woman, and the congealing of the mess into the humanoid and then into a man has something to do with the Hantavirus.

I'm sure everybody has heard about the Hantavirus issues at Yosemite Park by now. Over the summer, a few different campgrounds, including some high-end campgrounds with cabin-like tents, were infested by mice carrying the Hantavirus. One of the main effects of the Hantavirus is that is causes severe congestion of the lungs, which leads to severe pain, constrained breathing, and even death. News reports have said that about one-third of all people who contract Hantavirus die, and that there is no known cure for Hantavirus.

Hantavirus can be passed from mice to people, news reports say. Contraction of the virus usually occurs through contact with the urine or feces of an animal carrying the virus. But in dry places like Yosemite Park, where soil is as dry and potentially airborne as dust, when an animal urinates in the soil and that urine dries, the virus itself stays in the soil and is just as potentially airborne. In enclosed spaces, chances of breathing and contracting this airborne virus are even greater.

So Yosemite, to be on the safe side, has assumed that everybody who has stayed at the campgrounds infested by the infected mice is at risk of having contracted Hantavirus. The good thing about being on the safe side is that, even though there's no known cure for Hantavirus, being able to start therapy processes at the initial stages of contraction gives people a much greater chance of surviving through the illness.

So Yosemite has issued warnings to anybody who stayed in the infected areas. The unfortunate thing is, there were about 10,000 to 20,000 (based on some reports I've read) people who had been in the infected areas.

Hantavirus, odd as it may seem, has a connection with my life. About ten years ago, I worked in a National Park in the Southwestern United States. Hantavirus was a pretty normal thing around there. People didn't catch it because they were careful. It was pretty much assumed that all mice had Hantavirus. But it wasn't a huge worry.

But Hantavirus was big news in the region when I first arrived. A few people in the region, but not in the park I'd worked at, had caught the virus. Some died. Some lived to tell the stories of their agony. But after a month or so, the incidences and news flurry seemed to vanish.

The thing is, it's pretty easy to avoid getting Hantavirus. You keep your space clean and dust-free. To remove dust from a space, you wet it down, maybe even with a cleaning solution, and wipe it away. Most of the stuff people do in everyday housecleaning is enough to keep the virus at bay. And you stay away from abandoned houses and places where you see a lot of evidence of mouse activity.

But, of course, my mind ran a couple of doom scenarios. The first was that humans, acting as carriers of the virus, would pass the virus all over the world through their own urine and feces. This is kind of silly, I'd think. In most cases in the United States, human urine and feces goes through a treatment process that would kill the Hantavirus pretty easily. The virus is pretty nasty when it gets into a body. But it's pretty weak outside the body.

The second doom scenario my mind played out was that mice would travel home with people, hitching a ride in luggage, on cars, and so forth, and spread Hantavirus to other mice in other locales, thus spreading the disease beyond those initial sites. But, again, there have been Hantavirus outbreaks in the past. And the mice could just as easily have caught rides to other places in the past. They didn't. And the outbreaks have passed away. Just like this one will.

The doom scenarios, however, were in my dream a factor, I believe, in creating the Swamp Thing figure, who then became the annoying man. The Swamp Thing would in one sense be the embodiment of a pestilence.

I believe that in medieval times the Plague was often embodied as a figure. And I might have taken my understanding of that idea as inspiration for the Swamp Thing character in my dream as well. The fact that this body is walking among a huge crowd only underscores the idea of this Swamp Thing character being the embodiment of a pestilence of large-scale effect.

But I'm not sure why the dream is connecting a Plague of Hantavirus -- which obviously will not occur in waking life -- with my mom's artery problems. Both things have a risk of death associated with them. And so maybe I'm trying to keep the Plague of Death, in the figure of the annoying man, away from my mom, who doesn't look at all like the leader woman of my dream but could be related to her anyway, by telling the annoying man that the leader woman doesn't exist.

Again, I seem to end by not knowing how to make any connections. All I ever seem to come up with are starting points.

in the middle of the end of the road

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

One thing that I'd like to mention right away is that the beautiful sky imagery in the second part of the third dream comes almost from a NASA video I saw on YouTube. About once a week, NASA puts out a "Science Cast," which gives a little glimpse of some of the science NASA works on. This could be anything from astronomy to satellite technology to atmospheric phenomena. The Science Cast I watched last night was all about how the electromagnetic storms this July caused aurora borealis-like effects to spread all over the world.

I think this video heightened a lot of the mystic feeling of my dreams.

What I'd mainly like to think about, though, for this post, is the interaction I had with my great grandmother and my grandfather. Against all rationality, whenever I have dreams involving my great grandmother and my grandfather, I always think that they're actual interactions with them. My great grandma died three years ago, and my grandpa died four years ago.

In fact -- I've always kind of hated to admit this to anybody -- but one of the reasons I feel my life has taken the path it's taken lately is because of a dream I had with my great grandma in it. This dream occurred just a little over a year after my grandma had died. It seemed to precipitate me ejecting myself from my job and putting myself into a position where I had to come back home.

My thought -- well... let's say... I'm pretty agnostic in general. I think, depending on what mood I'm in, you could assume that my beliefs are mostly based on a physical world and nothing more. Don't ask me why.

I obsess over religion sometimes. I love the old Theosophy of Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant. I also obsess over not-quite-spiritual writers like Charles Fort. And I think of Carlos Castaneda as real philosophy. (Geez, that's a lot of Charleses, ain't it?) But I still have difficulty, almost all the time, believing that there's anything beyond existence other than the physical. That said, I still let mystical fancies play in my head almost nonstop.


"WTF?" you may be asking. Trust me, I ask the same thing. I WTF myself about once an hour.

One of my mystical fancies is that when my grandma died, she went straight to whatever the next plane of existence is. She didn't look back. She wanted to go. She was ready to go. She had people in the other world that she wanted to be with. And she didn't want to have to worry about this world anymore. So when she left, she left. That was my idea. And it was probably wrong.

So when my grandma died, I wasn't so surprised that I never saw her. Over the few months after my grandpa died, however, I had a couple of dreams about him. (Keep in mind my grandpa died a year before his mother, my great grandmother, died.)

It seems like he started out in those dreams with a very low level of intellect, like his spirit was really impaired by whatever the death process had been for him. But he was still trying to make contact from those worlds. Later on, I fantasize, he had much better ability to make contact. But he was still unable to keep himself mentally or "physically" (in terms of appearance) stable -- at least in the realm where he could interact with me. Once he got behind some wall, an invisible wall, which I saw as being the boundary of the other world, he was himself again, mentally and physically. But I personally could barely hear him!

Like I said before, I didn't have any dreams about my great grandmother. And I just figured that was because she'd headed out of this world and didn't look back. In spite of how much she loved all of her family in the living world, I think she was tired, and that she really wanted to be re-united with the people who had left her behind.

But one night I had a dream where I was at my great grandmother's house with my mom and my sister. My great grandmother rose up out of the floor and started yelling and screaming at me. I can't remember now what she wanted. But the feeling I got upon waking was that I needed to come back to my hometown.

At that point in time the dream did nothing for me other than fill me with a gnawing anxiety. I couldn't come back home. I was working a good job, a steady job, and I had a career that had a future. I felt terrible, of course, for not being able to be back home with my family, for not being able to see, for instance, my nephews grow up and go through all the important events of their lives. But I felt like I was fulfilling my own life's goals, and not just that my family understood this, but that they were proud of me for it.

Nevertheless, I've had this tendency all through my life, when I get the instinct that I need to make a change in my life, not necessarily to control the change, but to let my current life situation decay to the point where I need to make a change. There have been exceptions to the rule. But, to a large degree, I seem to let myself decay into change lazily, instead of taking an active role in the transitions in my life.

So I ended up quitting my job and losing all my money, etc., etc., until I was basically forced to come back home. I've harped on this one single event in my life enough throughout these posts. But one basic thought at the back of my mind all this time was that, if I did get back home, that I'd have some direction, some kind of answer, from my great grandma, on why she wanted me back home, what I was supposed to do.

As it turns out, I'm out here, I'm back home, and I feel even more lost, more confused, more afraid, more paranoid, than I did even while I was in New York! I miss New York terribly -- even though I hate the place -- and I want to be back there so bad. But I'm stuck here now. I'm not just stuck here. I'm stuck here in a situation where I'm not even sure, from month to month, if I'm going to be able to keep up my level of living. Okay. Enough of that.

So last night I got a surprise visit, not just from my great grandma, but from my grandpa. I'm not sure what the dynamic of things is -- why I helped my grandma around the house, and we had an interesting conversation, while my grandpa directly gave me information regarding the afterlife.

But my grandpa seemed, for the most part, normal, while he spoke with me. This might be the first time I've seen him in one of these "speaking with the dead" type of dreams where he's seemed normal. I should say that, from the time I saw my great grandma in a "speaking with the dead" dream, she seemed normal.

The information my grandpa passes me is that he woke into an afterlife, and some details on that afterlife. I take that information to help me not be afraid of death. I think about passing along this information. But I don't want my information to conflict with, or distort, other people's experiences, if they've had experiences like I've had, where they've interacted with my grandpa or great grandma after they've departed.

But at the same time -- especially with the earlier dreams I've had -- I've felt like I really should talk to people about the dreams I've had, like I should tell my mom, or my step grandmother, my grandpa's wife. I've gotten to a point, on a couple of occasions, where I was about to tell my mom. But it's really hard. I just -- I'm afraid. I don't know why.

Partly, I'm conflicted. Any psychologist will tell you that you probably aren't speaking to the dead. And I believe that. The world is what it is, physically. And I could -- well, for instance, I dreamt of Mr. Rogers one night and Michael Jackson another night. Do I think I really saw them? Of course not! So why do I think I saw my great grandma and my grandpa? Because I miss them. That's all. I didn't really speak with the dead.

So why would I tell my mom, who I know believes in all this stuff, that I spoke with my great grandma or my grandpa? Why would I upset her by telling her something I know to be an impossibility? It just seems cruel and absurd.

Now, obviously, crossing over the bridge in the second part of my grandma and grandpa dream is obviously a kind of analogy for my own passing into the afterlife. Which is kind of scary, especially with that freaky dog that unleashes Fortean torrents of rain upon me.

But the third dream also involves my death. So that's kind of scary, too. I'm walking toward some place out in the plains, apparently to get rid of teddy bears, which I associate in my mind with ancient Greek maidens sacrificing their dolls to Artemis as the maidens reach puberty.

But I'm turned around by a wise woman who holds five knives in her hand. I feel like the five knives almost certainly stand for the five of swords in Tarot. But I'm not sure what the five of swords would mean in Tarot, or what it would mean for a woman to be holding those swords -- or what it would mean for a woman holding the five of swords to be followed by near total darkness and death.

I should say that I'm not certain I die in that dream, or even that I'm injured. But I'm in the middle of a very narrow road. I've turned around from the task of sacrificing my dolls to Artemis. I see the light of my city in the distance. But it's not light enough to guide my way. I'm trying to find a bridge so I can cross a river I can't cross by wading. And, while searching -- by feeling -- in the dark for that bridge, a truck either nearly hits me (as I seem to sense it in the dream) or actually hits me (which I may have been too shocked actually to feel).

I'm lying on the ground, under a wheel, in what appear to be death linens. And I hear a woman screaming. So I obviously assume that I'm dead -- that I've been hit by the truck and killed. So that's a bit distressing. But I've had death dreams all my life, and I'm still alive. I don't think I'm going to die. I think that most of the time death dreams symbolize a transition.

What I'd guess is that, at the crossing of the bridge, I'm at the end of the road. I'm making a transition in life. But I'm completely in the dark. I have no idea where I'm going. I don't know if I'll make it across. But then -- bam! -- the transition hits me! Regardless of what I want, regardless of what I can do, my life makes a change.

That would be wish fulfillment, more than anything else -- just because I want so badly to have some sort of direction just take over my life. I really -- what I really want more than anything else, is not to have made the mistakes I've made in my life. I think that's why I keep turning back, turning back, in all my dreams. Maybe what this dream is saying is, "Quit turning back. All your mistakes have already been made. If you keep trying to turn back and undo your mistakes, you're going to find yourself in a great deal of pain."