Bucket List or Picnic Basket?

January always brings goals setting.

A bucket list is a popular way to capture what your heart would like to experience before the end of your days. Often these fantasies are unlikely to occur, though a creative person can accept slight changes– such as location–to cross off a bucket list item.

The basket concept (http://kathyssoapbox.blogspot.com/2013/04/bucket-list-or-picnic-basket.html) includes recent, current and near-future experiences. A basket holds your past adventures, calculates changing needs, abilities and desires for a more flexible and attainable reality.

So I can’t go jogging. The experience is carefully lifted from the basket to be slotted in past memories. I can walk the dog along the riverside park pathway. Add a bit more of those trips to the mix. Find some state park events on the easy list and experience more than just camping.

Baskets. I imagine I’d have a few to keep, swap and even eliminate.

See what you think. Drag that bucket out and realize there is much practicality can transform.

(C) 2014 Sandra Davidson

Wary Dreamer

Rarely have I dreamed of myself or as myself.

Perhaps it is the writer in me, those times when I wake from dreaming and, in the dark, scribble franticly to capture the essence of contiguous or repetitive dreams. No matter what the dream, I wake as if movie credits had
According to a professional source, this is highly unusual. A woman who has worked in the counseling profession for more than 20 years said she’d never had a client who dreamed this way.begun to roll. This is not to say I am unaffected by the dreams.

There have been few exceptions and I find them alarming and disturbing to the point I do not wish to rest, to risk sleep and another first-person dream. One span was in my early 20s. On a nightly basis I was eviscerating a person I knew; the details were visually and tactilely real.

These dreams pushed me into my first experience with a counselor. Obviously I resolved the underlying fears attached to the dreams and to the object of the dreams.

I’m not a violent person, though I know I could be if the act were necessary.

I’m dreaming in second person and first person again, sometimes switching between the two. Most often these dreams feature people I know. I can identify the key triggers, but they are rusty things, things I thought I had dealt with years ago. I feel I can find no resolution because the fears are known to me.

I want to go back to my normal. I can find no way across the chasm except down and forging through.