Sparks from the Fire

I’ve heard people say, “I don’t dream” or “I had no dreams last night”.  The truth is, all of us dream every night; in fact if we sleep the usual 8 hours we always have one about every 90 minutes or about 5 dream periods per night.  Trouble is, we just don’t remember them or even remember that we had them.

I’ve learned to pay close attention to my dreams.  As stories of the sub-conscious mind, they, if interpreted correctly, are fascinating indications of human behavior and feelings.  Though no expert in the field of dreams, I would call myself a hobbyist of dream analysis.

One of the most famous dream analyzers or dream interpreters was, of course, Joseph, from the Bible who had a colorful coat.  He was pretty good at it and even got himself out of prison with his talent when he interpreted the Pharaoh’s dreams correctly.  How he ever came up with the answers that he came up with, I’ll never know, but his deduction of famine was a doozy.  Very impressive.

Dream interpretation is really pretty easy if you just follow a few basic rules.
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I woke up this morning thinking about sleep – mostly how little we know about it.  We spend nearly a third of our lives in it while we’re here on the planet and yet we think about it little.  It’s just something we do.

I’m not at all an expert on the subject.  But I do have nearly 20 years of experience.  Trouble is, while I’ve been experiencing it, I’ve been asleep.
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I know one thing for sure: I don’t get enough of it.  Also, for the last 10 years my sleep patterns have really changed.  I used to get my 8 straight as a boy, then as a young man I moved to 6 a night.  I seemed to do just fine with that, but if I got even 5 on one night, then I’d have to get in a couple of 8 straight to get on top of it.  Otherwise I’d just be wasted for days.

Then, in my latter years, my sleep patterns changed again.  I think it was when my son was born and I used to take the middle of the night feeding so that my wife could sleep.  Waking up around 3 or 4 was excruciating for me.  I was a 6 straight guy and I would crawl out of bed when the baby would cry and stagger around like a drunk.

After the feedings stopped, I kept waking up anyway and laying there trying to go back to sleep.  I began, at those times, to suffer from insomnia.  It was not fun.  No matter what I did, I could not go back to sleep.  I tried everything.

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1.    The Heart That Beats – Why does the next beat take place? After all, it’s not like it’s bouncing.  Each beat, each pump of the pump comes because of this thing called ‘life’.  Do we have anything to do with this life essence?  Not that I know of.  I can locate no responsibility for this energy.  It is something that is given.  I do not engender it.  It’s there whether we think of it or not.  It’s there for us.  We have no clue where in space it comes from, how it got there, why it’s just always there.  But it is.  There is always the next beat of the heart.  And you have trouble believing in some higher power?

2.    The Breath You Take – (See above) Also, I think of the complex machinery that activates this life activity.  What a miracle!  We slap a baby’s bottom and it starts.  Then it continues with relatively no input from us for a lifetime. The average respiration rate for a person at rest is about 16 breaths per minute.  This means on average, we breathe about 960 breaths an hour or 23,040 breaths a day or 8,409,600 a year. If a person lives to 80, then that means on average they will take 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime!  That’s you.  That’s me.  Cool.

3.    Those We Love – Why is this?  These are the folks we should appreciate the most, but seldom do.  These are the people we should count in our blessings every day.  But these are the people that we expect to love us back because we love them.  Perhaps it’s the nature of love.  We love and expect love in return.  And you know, it almost always does – return, that is.  In fact, I’ll bet that it always does when our love is pure.  That’s the nature of love.  It’s a circle.  Instinctively we know this and so we tend to take it for granted.

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