Last night, around 7:00 we heard tornado sirens outside. It's a sound I haven't heard in years unless it was 9am on the first Tuesday of the month. Come to think of it, I don't think I've noticed it then in a while either. I decided to shut down my computer right away and lost of bunch of articles and websites that I'd been keeping open all week, planning to write about them. Maybe 10 minutes after the sirens went off, the neighborhood was engulfed in a rush on wind and dark clouds. It went from eire calm to violent storm in under a minute. The roof sounded like it was going to be ripped off by the first gust of wind.
Minutes after the storm blew in, there was a large pop and we lost power. The candles came out, the neighbor's tree fell on itself, and one of my roommates returned with a stack of frozen pizzas that was now of no use to us.
I probably shouldn't have taken a nap that late, but the silence, the darkness, and the candle light was like a drug. Between the nap and the neighbors' struggling gas generator I found it a little hard to fall asleep again, but I realized that my work schedule had changed and I didn't really have to get up at 6:30 the next morning. So I stayed up and wrote by candle light . . . in a storm . . . how artsy is that?
I have the most vivid memory of dreams on the mornings when I wake up and fall back asleep for a bit. If any of you are into interpreting dreams, take note. You're gonna have a ball with this one:
[that was a dream line]
In the first part of my dream I'm upstairs in the bathroom of my house in Aurora. I have the vague sense that I'm getting ready for my day or something, but it's not that early. and I hadn't just woken up. I'm a weird combination of ages too. I'm probably in early high school, but I'm also who I am now with a little bit of little kid in me. Anyway, the weird thing is that I'm holding this baby in my arms. And the baby is me. Sort of, it's a kind of duplicate of me as a baby. It's cold, but as the dream goes on it becomes more real and alive. The last thing I remember is going to show my baby-self to my mom and her being a little sad remembering me as a baby.
In the second part of my dream, I'm with Illini Life, my church. We're standing on gravel on the edge of a lake. Everything is grey and foggy. It looks like a picture or a desaturated movie. The people are in color though.
The place where we were standing must've been man-made because the ground we were on was at water-level, but as soon as you stepped off the edge, the water was about 4 feet deep. Anyway, they were going to explain something about baptism, so Al, this huge beast of a guy, walks out onto the water, turns around and starts talking to us. He has Darren get in with him so he can demonstrate something, except Darren hops down into the water. So he keeps talking and this phone rings. Darren walks to the side a little where there's a gravel beach and picks up a black office phone and says it's for Al. He goes to answer it and I glance over and see Dan give this kind of frustrated look. Apparently the phone call is about some other I Life team that had been doing work, something went wrong and they had to "put the roof back on" to the house they were working on. Al is disappointed, but I guess everyone is ok. This he's talking, he's kind of leaning down into the gravel and eventually he's laying down, he's sunk down a few inches into the gravel and water. We can still see him because the gravel didn't flow over and cover him, but his back is definitely an inch lower than the surface of the gravel/water and his head is covered and under water, but he's still talking to Dan and Darren about the phone call, so apparently he can breathe fine.
At this point, my phone rings and wakes me up. It was my boss. So I ran into work to cover someone else's butt. Aren't I a swell guy?
Seriously though, the imagery in that dream was so loaded. Feel free to take a crack at it.
Bush is getting a grasp on our energy problems and manages to dip his finger into global warming at the same time. His plan: Let's make it cheaper for people to buy gasoline by letting refiners skip out on some of the measures they take to reduce pollution. Meanwhile he strongly urges that someone should do something about our country's oil use.
A little old fashioned, a little modern – you're the best of both worlds. And so is Amsterdam.
