Flower dreams

Blossoms on High Street in West Chester, Pennsylvania. (April 2007)

In my dreams, I never have an age.

~ Madeleine L’Engle

Last night (well, really it was early this morning) I had a dream that was filled with flowers. Someone was teaching me to identify wildflowers by their leaves, their blossoms, and their stems. Wouldn’t it be nice to learn through dreaming and wake up with a head full of knowledge you didn’t have when you went to sleep?

A rose from Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. (May 2007)

In my dream the world was filled with flowers. The fields were covered with them. Trees were blossoming. Pathways were lined with colorful flowers.

Longwood Gardens woodland path. (May 2007)

Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.

~ Marsha Norman

It was the height of spring in my dream, when the world is bursting with a riot of colors. Everything was bathed in a warm and soft light.

Longwood Gardens. May 2007.

I suspect the dream was a result of helping M sort through photos last night. We found a box of prints that hadn’t been put into photo albums. The images are from our year in Sabbaticalville (West Chester, Pennsylvania). We visited Longwood Gardens frequently so I tend to think of that year as the year of the flowers.

Wildflowers from a hike at Laurel Preserves. May 2007.

Who knew that insanity came in hot flashes?

~ Deborah Cooke, Kiss of Fate

I read somewhere that hot flashes are the main cause of sleep disruption in women over the age of fifty. I didn’t need to read it to know it to be true. I’ve been having hot flashes for a while, but they suddenly got much worse. They are driving me nearly insane, especially at night. I don’t sleep much. It is not until around four o’clock in the morning that they cease and desist, and I am finally able to fall into a lovely, deep, filled-with-dreams, sleep.

The spy in the garden. Longwood Gardens. May 2007.

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

~ Poppy Z. Brite

Longwood Gardens. May 2007.

I keep wondering if maybe I should flip my sleep schedule on its head. Go to bed at 4am and wake up in time for the hot flashes to begin in the afternoon. I tried the night shift once, long ago, when I worked for a company that prints checks. I didn’t do well. But I didn’t have hot flashes keeping me awake, either.

I can probably stop labeling these now. Just assume they’re from 2007 unless I state otherwise.

But Pooh couldn’t sleep. The more he tried to sleep the more he couldn’t. He tried counting Sheep, which is sometimes a good way of getting to sleep, and, as that was no good, he tried counting Heffalumps. And that was worse. Because every Heffalump that he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh’s honey, and eating it all. For some minutes he lay there miserably, but when the five hundred and eighty-seventh Heffalump was licking its jaws, and saying to itself, ‘Very good honey this, I don’t know when I’ve tasted better,’ Pooh could bear it no longer.

~ A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

I reckon that’s it from this land of sleeplessness. Perhaps I’ll try Pooh’s method tonight and count Heffalumps. I would gladly allow them to eat all the honey in the house in exchange for some sleep.