one thing leads to another

sunrise here one morning

When it comes to reading books, one might well ask where the story is taking you. Can you really read books and set them aside with no impact on your personal life? If that impact is negative, where will that leave you?

When I had finished re-reading Diana Gabaldon's historical fiction novel, Voyager, I knew there had been one potential disaster after another. It was a good read but definitely high stress with a lot of emotional moments as well as physical violence. She wasn't forcing those things into her plot. It was that kind of historical time period where some had absolute and abusive power over many.

That night I had a dream where flood was coming around my home. When I first saw all the water, it was already up to our driveway with a lot of current. I realized my idea to protect the house was already too late. We do get floods from our innocent little creek but they don't come up that fast and our bulwark is fence posts with half plywood sheets wired to redirect the fast flow. Too late for that.

This flood was fast moving and going the opposite of the direction from which a flood here generally comes. In the dream, it was soon nearly to our foundation. I was worried how we'd get our cats out when we had to leave. Also I worried about our outside dog (which we had years ago but who also died years ago). I went into our bedroom, and the flood had caught a hot tub (which we used to have but no longer do), outside our bedroom and slammed it against the wall causing it to crack and knocking me almost over.

Next I realized water was on the other side of the house also which meant getting out of the house was no longer an option. That is about when the dream ended. 

Here's what the Dream Moods Dictionary said that meant: 

"To dream that you are in a flood represents your need to release some sexual desires. If the flood is raging, then it represents emotional issues and tensions. Your repressed emotions are overwhelming you. Consider where the flood is for clues as to where in your waking life is causing you stress and tension. Alternatively, the dream indicates that you are overwhelming others with your demands and strong opinion. Still another interpretation could be your desire to wipe everything clean and make a fresh new start."

Not hard to see from where that came after reading a book with exciting and violent energy. In Voyager, the hero and heroine go from one catastrophe to another barely escaping death even if sometimes left battered. There are threats hanging over their heads from the start of the book. Good read, exciting read (if you skip the long descriptive sections), but stressful. I don't think the flood related to my personal life right now but instead illustrated how I had been impacted by what I had read. It might not always be that immediately obvious, but this time it was.

It's also not hard to see how just reading and thinking about the newspaper could lead to bad dreams considering what is in it these days.  Just the brutal slaying of the journalist by ISIL would be enough to lead to nightmares-- even in avoiding the worst of the photos, which I did. It's too easy to relate to the young man, to his parents, to the horror. This guy was the hero of romance books except real life doesn't reward heroes quite the same.

What I think my dream told me is how quickly what we take in impacts us. The information does not stop with my head but carries over to my personal emotions-- even when I don't realize from where it is coming.

Sometimes what I've put in my head turns out to be good-- like the dream I had last night which was impacted by our having just watched Dirty Dancing and my making a new cover for my contemporary story of cults and love-- Hidden Pearl. To do that, I had spent time with Jimmy Thomas' images (tried two) to put the photo into a background I wanted (up the Umpqua River). That requires a lot of cut, paste and then clone to hide the evidence.

Time with this guy's face is never a bad thing ;)-- well, his body's not bad either *double wink*. Regarding that dream, let me just say I woke up smiling. Totally unrealistic, as was the other one, but the energy was the opposite. 

Here's the thing. Take in positive information, and we get one kind of energy. Negative leads to another. Yet how can we totally avoid the negative and stay responsible? We cannot put our heads in the sand, much as we might like to at times-- that leads to places like Ferguson. So how do we reduce the stress from what we can't avoid? I liked the suggestions here:   

Stress relief tactics Navy Seals swear by