Mental postcards

I had a strange dream the other day and the resulting effects of it have left me a little confused but very intrigued.

I dreamt of a huge cumulus cloud growing over my head. It was the only cloud in the sky - which was a deep azure blue.

The cloud rose quickly like a thunder head but didn't have the classic anvil top on it like those big clouds usually do. This was more like a column that rose straight up into the sky.

That was it! It lasted for about 10 seconds max and I woke up properly (I actually "knew" I was dreaming when I saw that cloud, a somewhat bizarre experience really but quite interesting).

During my shower that morning I was thinking about the cloud dream thing, wondering as I usually do what it all "meant".

I could still "see" it in my mind. Like a picture postcard you stick on your fridge.

So I "looked" at the cloud and sort of walked toward it in my head (its a kind of daydreaming thing now) ... well it grew arms as if to embrace me and then suddenly... and I mean suddenly.... it was a tiny little beige-grey mouse sitting in the palm of my hand eating crushed peanuts.

This is VERY strange and completely unexpected of course. So NOW I have this "postcard" of this MOUSE stuck inside my head and it keeps morphing and growing like a pictorial story.

I can "see" the mouse nibbling on the nuts with its little teeth and its whiskers twitch as it gobbles up its food. It is looking straight at me with beady, twinkly curious black eyes without judgement or endearment.

I hate mice as a rule. I refuse to have anything to do with mice or mouse-traps! My husband said when we got married he would NOT be touching the iron and I said I would NOT be touching the mouse-traps! We have lived content with this contract for nearly 17 years :)

The irony is though that my FAVOURITE thing as a child was a soft toy mouse made by my mother in her teens. "Mousey" was my best friend and I literally carried him everywhere in the palm of my hand for quite a number of years. He is all of about four inches tall and looks nothing like a real mouse but is still a "mouse" of sorts. I still have him in my bedside drawer! *grin* He will be approaching 50+ years old soon I think.

And then a new thought suddenly appeared in my mind today out of the blue. I was chatting to a friend when the line "Many Mighty Mice are Making Magical Music in the Moonlight" popped into my head. It's a line from a story I read often as a kid - I can't even remember which book it's from but that line has stayed with me all these years.

So there you go. Mitch is officially stark raving mad huh?

Clouds become mice in this twisted inner world I live in.

I think there is more to come to this story perhaps. The mouse hasn't finished telling his tale (pun intended) yet :) What comes next will probably have me certified anyway!

Dreams have a funny way of doing things to us in our real life. The inner world and the world of reality collide in strange and unique ways when we take the time to revisit those dreams we remember from our slumbers and study them as you would those postcards on the fridge, all while lucid and awake.

It's about inspiration and feeling not knowledge so much. A kind of Dreamtime of ones own really. A way of reconnecting the inner world within and coherently combining it with the self we present in our every day awake world.

I know! It all sounds a little whacko really! But it IS fun to explore ones imagination like this and see where the journey takes you.

Remember that cult activity of a few years ago when garden gnomes were stolen/borrowed from gardens and the owner of said gnome would get postcards from it in the mail as it travelled the "world"?

Well, that's a little bit like what I'm trying to describe here. You borrow the image you remember from your dreams and you let your imagination take it on a 'trip' inside your head and allow yourself to SEE the journey unfold. Free Associating but with mental pictures instead of words I guess.

It's totally irrational and probably DOES mean I'm completely mad but its fun and interesting and creative at the same time.

I guess it also helps if you are highly visual in your thinking processes too. Aurally dominant thinkers would probably find this a hard thing to do perhaps: so maybe they would have to do this kind of thing with sounds and language rather than imagery. I am a very dominant visual thinker (something I've only noticed recently actually), I sense and mentally process thought through imagery more often than most other ways. I guess that's why I find this stuff so interesting and fun to do.

Of course the ONE thing I find terribly frustrating is that my natural wont is to try to make MEANING from these images! To make them make sense in some sort of logical and cohesive way. I can't make a cloud becoming a mouse make any sense at all! Total and irrevocably nonsensical that huh? But I DO have a feeling deep inside that that cloud and that mouse have something to do with me as a person and I am currently exploring that inspiration with new-found curiosity. :)

Soooo... unless I'm incarcerated in the nearest institution by my family for cerebral imbalance... I just might keep you aprised!

;)