Lots to Talk About: Dana's Dreams, Books, & More...

   First, I finished the cover of Dana's Dreams Two which came to me directly from a dream a couple of months ago. They were painted on the ceiling of a dressing room where I was changing my clothes. I have put them on loads of things on ZAZZLE: 

Wallpaper

Acrylic Prints

Ladies' Denim Jackets

Planners

Pillows

  Next, and sticking to the subject, I was telling my aunt how she might remember her dreams when The GOOGLE Monster gobbled everything that I had written up like a bag of cookies. A lot of folks might be interested, so here it goes. Take a glass of water to bed with you. Take a sip and say aloud, "I will remember my dreams". Set the glass on your nightstand. When you wake take a sip. Keep a dream notebook close to your bed. When you first wake, do not stir. Lie there and unravel your dream. Write down keywords in your notebook, so that you might remember upon waking. Share your dreams, talk about them. You must get to them first thing, otherwise you will forget. Pickles and pepperoni are dream foods, pickles being #1. The dream symbolism that you find online goes back to the ancient Egyptian priests. Finally, I had shared tonight's dreams with her: 

  2/21

  First I woke up as I heard Ron yelling, “Dana!”, in my head. This is the third time this has happened lately. It was just a dream, though very real. 

  The next dream was just a snippet: turquoise ladies panties embroidered with an Aztec bird were dancing in my head. 

  The third dream was Aunt Nancy’s summer wedding. Aunt Janet was there. They wore long matching sun dresses with blue and white printed roses on a red background. We were late getting to the church and missed the ceremony. We were waiting at my grandmother’s house. There was a dark haired young man working along the side of the house who I got snippy with. He had two of Mummy’s long stemmed fake flowers that Aunt Nancy was asking about. One was just a green bud, but the other might’ve been one of those dancing daisies. My little cousin had a big naked Jane doll still in the box. I was looking out the window at Aunt Nancy and her groom lying on a patio, snuggling. I told my cousin that Aunt Nancy and I both had Jane dolls too. 

Dana's Dreams

Now, on with my readings. Tonight's quotes are taken from BATTLEFIELD and Eisenhower:

"It dawned on me that I was up against more than an inflexible rule; I was challenging a tenet of economic survival. A utility company was loath to relinquish even one customer whose lifetime of rate-paying would add tens of thousands of dollars to its coffers." Svenson

This book, that Ron got for me at The Farnsworth House for Easter, is brilliantly written by an artist no less. In Farming a Civil War Battleground Peter Svenson gets down to the bones about building his third house.

"MacArthur, the most political of generals, never succeeded in politics, while three of the most apolitical generals in American history, Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower, did. They were true American Caesars, only American soldiers to hold both supreme military and political power." Ambrose

From BATTLEFIELD

 

  "Again, that reminder or remainder of humanity wafted on the air, and it startled me. I thought I might be going mad. 

  Having respect for the dead means that future generations don't pave over cemeteries for parking lots. Cemeteries are paved over, on occasion, but it is the exception rather than the rule. There is no law, however, that says cemeteries can't be tourist attractions. A headstone, plain or fancy, reminds onlookers that so-and-so existed within the confines of two dates. If the carved numerals are decipherable, a moment of mental arithmetic ensues, a calculation of how old so-and-so lived to be. 

  In Harrisonburg there are more than 250 Confederate graves in a quadrant of the oldest cemetery. Each small marble marker reads like a word in a chilling sentence, or a sentence in a numbing chapter. The regularity with which the markers are placed, row upon row like a marching battalion, suggests an orderliness, a solidarity of purpose. The Southern Cause is given shape and substance. I know it is an act of practicality, the organizing of corpses in a limited space, but still the geometry of the graves disturbs me. Death for any cause, lost or won, is not quite so cut and dried as a cemetery layout."

Peter Svenson

  We just got back from the casino. Frankie and I are about to make more pumpkin muffins from Shannen O'Lantern. I froze some. 

Happy Thanksgiving! 🍂

From Battlefield:

 "The thing I sensed was that people had been here before, en masse. At times, I have noted a comparable intimation after a public auction, when the last item of furniture has been carted off and the last pickup truck has driven away. The grass is patterned with tire tracks and footprints. The buzz of the crowd, the auctioneer's warble still echo in my ears. A whiff of humanity lingers, a subtle indefinable something, but it is not an olfactory sensation. It, too, is an echo, a reverberation of the auction-goers who were convened an hour earlier. A similar presence lingered in these pastures a hundred and twenty-three years after the battle. After that length of time, I would not have thought it possible to stand at the heart of a battlefield and pick up its living pulse." Peter Svenson

From BATTLEFIELD by Peter Svenson

 

"The rebel yell, a bloodcurdling scream of fear and fearlessness, was a Confederate soldier's personal talisman against the odds. Soldiers from both sides yelled as they advanced upon each other (as soldiers have always done), but the rebel yell was different. It was a combination of baying at the moon and cussing without words: a white man's war whoop. To my mind the rebel yell signaled the obsolescence of those eightteenth-century tactics in that it functioned not only as a war cry, but also as an expression of pure terror, a soulful reaction to the deadly science of gunnery. To maintain courage in a hail of lead that pierced the body with holes the size of a dime and exited with holes the size of a fist, to maintain courage against the pressure of canister shot that clipped huge gaps in battle lines- to keep one's mind amid the din and smoke of the carnage- it was necessary to scream at the top of the lungs. It had nothing to do with valor." 

"Like the general in Dr. Strangelove who rode an A-bomb out the open hatch, combatants will continue to yell the rebel yell, or something that approximates it, but nobody will be listening. Technology does not have ears or a soul."