My latest lucid dreaming innovation is to make notes during the night with my eyes closed. I experimented with a pen with a light in the tip, and with just turning on a small LED light and sort of trying to wedge it between my chin and my chest while writing, but Patricia Garfield convinced me that keeping one’s eyes closed is best.
She has some method of writing on 5 x 8” pieces of paper while keeping her lines readably straight. Maybe I’ll get the hang of that later, but for now, I’m writing on 3 x 5” pads. I have one under each of my two pillows, and one on the nightstand, with a Pentel P205 pencil clipped to each.
I pick up the pad with my left hand and hold it from behind with my thumb on the left side and other fingers on the right side, up near the top, and write two or three words on the top line. Then I move my thumb down a tad, tap my thumb with the tip of the pencil so I can feel where the line should start, write a few words, and so forth.
When I’m done, I peek at the clock and then, with my eyes closed again, write the time on the back of each piece of paper before dropping it on the floor. In the morning, there is a little snowstorm of notes on the floor, including things I had already forgotten.
I’m also putting a bit more effort into considering the messages my dreams might have for me, mainly by thinking about what associations I have with the main elements. On a night I was thinking about changing jobs, for instance, I dreamed of coming to a fork in the road and realizing there weren’t just two choices; there were three, four, five, and the most forbidding turned out to be perfectly workable.
I went to the hospice this past Saturday, and while I was there, a harried-seeming person arrived, possibly a doctor, who requested that the doors on either side of an elevator lobby be closed.
A short while later, my person sent me on an errand, and as I opened the door to the elevator lobby, I saw the doctor, if such he was, wheeling out a corpse. It was small, and wrapped in a blue blanket.
I had just come out of the kitchen and the door was still open behind me. I suddenly realized the people in the kitchen, patients and their visitors, might also be able to see the dead body, so I closed the door quickly, and then was in the tiny space with the doctor and the gurney and the dead person. In fact, the doctor backed into me. “Sorry!” I said.
I left the place soon after and happened to see the slight bundle being loaded into an unmarked van the doctor had pulled up on the sidewalk. I walked over to the Tibet Shop and bought a raw silk scarf in a gorgeous deep purple, made in Nepal. It seemed like a good moment for something beautiful. I told the shop owner what I’d just seen, and he murmured, “Impermanence.”
The bike parking in my building at work has been nearly at maximum capacity lately, so I went to see the building manager to tell her about an idea I’d had. We have a rack, a cage enclosing a rack, and another rack. It seems to me that if the cage itself were removed, we could fit a lot more racks in that general area; all of this is in a spot not accessible to the public.
The building manager is extraordinarily warm and friendly. She has the clearest skin and eyes I’ve ever seen, and she kept patting my arm. She studied the cage and said, “This thing is a waste of space, isn’t it? You know, I think this thing is a waste of space! I’m going to call my bike rack man.”
She said she’s working on a lot of green improvements in the building—instructions from the company she works for—and asked if I’d be interested in helping with a commuter survey, to find out how people are traveling to work. I said I’d love to do that. Part of her mandate is to support environmentally friendly ways of getting around.
As a gentlewoman of 47, I have lately had to give some thought to facial fuzz—that wasn’t there before, was it? I’m pretty sure not—and decided that smooth skin was preferable even if interspersed with periods of what one would have to call stubble, so, not long ago, I was shaving away in my cube at work when the guy who sits across from me passed right by without a word—after all, what exactly would he say? “I see you’re shaving”?
A few days later, I was recalling that the last hair artiste to attempt an improvement in my coiffure had said there’s a hole in the back that she didn’t put there (in my hair, not my actual skull, presumably), and it occurred to me to try to get a look at this using two mirrors. I had my head stuck into the shelf over my desk, where one mirror is, and was using a small hand mirror to try to see the spot in question when—yep—the same guy passed by again. He didn't say anything that time, either.
Of the first, my mother said, “My mother never told me not to shave my chin where other people could see me, probably because it never occurred to her that it needed saying.”
In the end, I decided to rebrand “perimenopausal facial hair” as “beautiful gleaming angel down” and to pretend I live, say, where Frida Kahlo lived; i.e., where someone with smooth skin is seen as lacking something essential.
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