Tag: dreams

Cozy Posts · Poetry

The Dream House

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

I have a home inside my dreams

amid a forest of evergreens,

with sparkling water not too far,

and skylights to let in the stars.

My forest, green with mossy bark,

from misty rain and velvet dark,

has soil soft with molted leaves

outside home’s walls and wooden eaves.

A fire set in white-washed stone

highlights the mantle’s honey-tone.

It warms the room, glowing serene,

and conjures up a cozy scene.

And when I dream, I walk the halls,

trail fingertips on gray, stone walls.

I plod upon the cushioned rugs

while balancing steaming tea mugs.

Inside, there is one thing it lacks-

a place to sleep. But why? you ask.

In dreams, I do not sleep a wink,

for that would be surreal; I think.

Instead there is a weathered chair,

its leather arms, softened from wear.

I curl up in its squashy seat

to take in a view that can’t be beat.

Windows look out on dense trees,

a wall of glass to better see

the mossy world my house calls home,

beneath the color-changing dome.

I look out at my forest grow

and know, in waking, I must go.

I savor time and stone and beams

while I’m awake inside my dreams.

Poetry

George Bailey

Beth DeFries1 Comment

Fate is a dance on a retractable floor

revealing a swimming pool.

The threat is exciting,

the water- inviting.

Sometimes you can’t help but fall in.

A cat in a box

In Schrödinger’s thoughts

Would tell you you’ve little to say

In the matters of fate and lasers and beams,

Trapped as we are in sadistic dreams

Where false seems real and reality fake.

Mary leaned over and whispered,

Yet also, Mary did not.

It depends on the channels to which you subscribe.

It depends on George Bailey’s ever being alive,

But her words echo now while constructing these lines.

“George Bailey, I’ll love you till the day I die.”

New paths sprout up all around.

Some are searing and bright.

Some lack shadow or sound.

Stumble or wander wherever you may

For you’ve little to say in the matter of fate.

Just ask that cat in the box.

Too late.

Buffalo gals won’t come out tonight,

Say the moon’s an impractical gift,

Yet George Bailey’s dream soar.

Practicality’s a bore.

It’s a wonderful life, so long as it’s lived.

Poetry

Dream on the Cusp

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

Woke up today feeling small-

Not weak or defeated,

Just not much at all,

A speck on a marble that spins round and round,

In a bed, in a house, on the ground.

You couldn’t see me from space,

Head up in the clouds

Of fog fallen from grace,

Looking up towards the gray to peel and reveal,

And wonder why Earth’s a big deal.

Dreams circle black holes

Drawn to depths un-suspect,

Stretched like melted shoe soles,

Till I can’t recognize, translate, or surmise,

Stars extinguished from sparkling skies.

Wake to reason sipped on the porch-

Ground elixir of addicts

That can’t hold a torch

To the infinite warps of spacetime, sublime

That inspired this wandering rhyme.

Health & Lifestyle

Conjuring Dreams and Nightmares

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

I have not been sleeping well lately, you guys. Since mid-July, when I decided to leave my full-time job, I have been working on a novel. Before I started working on it, I felt a little lost and unfulfilled by my career and was questioning my self-worth too often, pulling up little to satisfy the cavity of what I had to show for my contributions to the world, thus far. I craved a sense of fulfillment that I could actualize and needed to pursue an activity at full-steam that would make me feel like myself again.

My stock on happiness and self-worth had dwindled below the recommended reserve and I felt disappointed in myself for not nurturing my creative strengths, for so long. Even if this novel doesn’t end up making a single penny and even if it is rejected by publishers, it will have been worth the time for what I have gained in self-discovery. I feel like me again, and it’s taken a long time, but for the first time since college, I feel like a writer again. Writing a book has been a dream of mine since I was a kid and now, it is one that I am determined to make a reality with this new project.

When I started working on this novel in July, I had no idea how long it would take to finish a first draft. To be honest, I had little confidence that I’d even be able to do it and worried that the initial excitement of the process would wear off. My mantra became Jodi Picoult’s wise quote, “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page,” so I wrote some bad pages to start and then they morphed into a plottable base for a story and a set of characters whom I have grown to love.

As I got to writing, the confidence in my ability to accomplish the task at hand began to grow. I began reading about other successful writers’ routines and habits and was able to ballpark a timeline for when I could likely have a first draft finished. In September, I set a deadline of October 17th for my first draft. Now that that deadline is just around the corner, I am not as afraid of it as I thought I’d be. I have been diving deeper into the world that I have spent the past three months creating and that world is growing more developed each day. So far, it has been a passion project not without its difficulties – both creatively and psychologically.

I like to write mystery. If you’ve every read a mystery, you’ll know that the genre requires some shady characters. I have been putting off writing the details to the darker side of my story for a while, but last week, I finally plunged down the rabbit hole of researching and writing them and have yet to come out the other side.

I have learned that I have two designated writing spaces in our home. One is the chaise seat of our blue couch, where I am writing this now, and the other is at my desk that I also use as a nightstand. I think the concept of a designated writing space can come in handy when working on building a villain’s story arc, however, I think I used the wrong one when constructing mine.

Writing a villainous story arc at my desk right next to where I sleep was not a wise idea. It is hard to sleep easy where you have created a monster. When I close my eyes at night, the stories I have read for research come to mind and the stories that I have created join them, invading the counting sheep’s pasture with dark clouds and ominous sounds, causing them to flee because they too can sense that something bad is lurking there. I get through the battle of sleep, on edge from the start, wondering what evil awaits me in my REM cycle, and let me tell you, it has been pretty creative, you guys.

I’ve always had a talent for being easily frightened. Pair that with a fear of the dark and terrible vision and voila!; you’ve got yourself a bedroom stalker that is actually just a table with a fan on top of it. While I, without my glasses on, am the most likely thing to go bump in the night, my imagination plays tricks on me with evils that aren’t there, conjured from harmless shadows, shapes, and light.

Coffee probably doesn’t help either. Some days, I can’t seem to write a word without coffee so I have coffee and then I have some more to keep going. Something that used to be a slow, enjoyable part of my morning routine has become a crutch for putting words on the page, but I think I’d like for coffee to go back to being a moderated morning indulgence to simply enjoy as I wake up. Writing anxiety-inducing story arcs on two cups of coffee isn’t a blend that hits the spot. For my writing sessions, I think I’ll switch to herbal tea and see if a sense of calm comes easier when it’s time to sleep.

Either way, I think the sense of accomplishment of finishing a first draft will be worth the sleepless nights and that perhaps I could use some toughening up anyway for the rewrite road ahead. But now, it’s that time in the day to close my laptop and take in the ocean view and a few sips of chamomile and honey to help guide me back from the winding depths of Wonderland.

Mental Health · Poetry

The Mountain

Beth DeFries2 Comments

In my dream, I married a mountain.

And sprouted up from its rocky terrain as grass and trees and wildflowers,

Contouring its stony face with sparkling waterfalls and trickling streams.

I was the flora and the fauna and the dirt.

I was the beautiful parts of earth – on the mountainside.

The birds, the insects, the goats, and the sheep;

I was the fish in the streams – the moss on the trees.

All sprouted from me –

and all for the love of the mountain.

The mountain gave little in return except the surface on which to grow,

And in my dream I grew weary of creating beauty alone.

The grass grew brown, the flowers wilted, and the animals grew hungry.

The mountain’s sorrow built and a storm brewed and lashed with heavy rains.

The mountain shook with great sobs and my land began to shift and slide.

Down – down – down the mountainside.

Buried in the mountain’s grief,

Concealed in soaking rubble,

A heap of beauty on the ground

Torn apart and strewn around.

That is until the storm clouds parted and the heavy rains ceased.

Quenched with sun and released from the mountain,

I gathered my debris.

My twigs, my leaves, my petals and seeds

My bones and blood and the survivors of the fall.

And reworked it all into something new.

And then I awoke to you.

Grief & Loss · Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health

Star Matter to Dark Matter and Back

Beth DeFries1 Comment

I began to minimize my faith in religion back in 2012. It was a very confusing and draining time in my life, brought on by my great aunt’s losing battle with pancreatic cancer a year earlier.

After her death, I was not the same person and I felt the cavity of her absence to my core. In attempts to be happy again, I talked to Mike almost every day, despite living in different cities. I watched dozens of DVDs from my university’s library, escaping into Singin’ in the Rain, Finding Neverland, and Ever After, to name a few. I bottled up my grief – wrote stories and essays about loss for class assignments, and pulled myself up from piles of blankets and sweatshirts on my dorm room bed. I took a trip to Florida and met Mike’s aunt and uncle for the first time and they took us to Disney World. It all helped a little, bit by bit, but I still felt lost. I prayed to God and to my aunt each night, longing to be heard. I cried till my nose grew raw with the salt of grief each time there was no response, and after a year – I stopped praying all together.

I slowly came to terms with an understanding that she was gone permanently and I that couldn’t talk with her anymore, only to her memory. I rationalized the unlikelihood that there was really a heaven, to the point where such a concept did not make sense to me anymore. I began to view Jesus as a good, self-sacrificing, historical figure who lived by contagious ethical values and began to realize that his mother, Mary, may have just been a young girl, newly married, and uneducated in matters of sexuality.

I began to stumble across my aunt in dreams, but she was different – not the person I had known. Something was always off about her. I’d be dreaming that I was walking around the corner in our family shore house and happen upon her standing there, wordless, in the middle of the kitchen, lit only by the bulb inside the refrigerator, her back to me. She never spoke to me in these early dreams. She was child-like, but looked even older than she did just before she died. She seemed happy in the dreams, but always with an air of infantile innocence about her, as though she were a newborn old person.

To not be able to speak with her was painful, and to fear her was worse, because at the time, all I needed to know was that she was still there if I needed her, that I could somehow break through the curtain between the realm of the dead and the living. I just didn’t know how yet.

I gained more of an interest in the science of the how the universe works and an appreciation for quantum theory a few years later, recognizing in them new ways to describe what I once called faith. I marveled in the idea that most of the elements in human bodies were formed in stars and gained an appreciation for the existence of humanity as we know it. I grew fascinated by the concept of time and how it works differently in the vastness of space than on Earth. At one point, I felt overwhelmingly small and helpless, a miniscule person, afraid, on a miniscule rock in an infinite stretch of something my brain will never fully comprehend. I learned about energy, the duality of electrons, and Schroedinger’s theory and wondered how many versions of each of us exist in infinite alternate realities, if at all. I wondered if my aunt was still alive in one. Or if I was dead in another. I began to appreciate my reality more and was fascinated by the mystery and possibility of it all. I started to feel comfortable with the unknown again. I still feel small, but also part of it all, and not alone. I am but one compilation of star matter trying to make sense of dark matter(s) and accepting that it’s ok if I can’t.