Ghost stories as told by Dad

Nancy the Dog

Grammy Grace's dog must have been around 20 lbs.  She used to let it out to do its business.  This was in the wintertime.  There was some snow on the ground.  People say some big bird must have come down and grabbed her.  But there were no marks in the snow where a bird of prey would have swooped down.  Just the dog's tracks that went out in the snow and stopped.

It was starting to get a little darker.  I summoned my friend Roger Bowles up there, and we went all around the buildings of that farm.  We went all the way around in several circles, but there was no sign or tracks except for where the little dog's tracks stopped.

It's like you said, the Virgin Mary ascended bodily to heaven.

We never saw that dog again.

Strange synchronicity and Jean Cocteau

For reasons I do not understand, I was searching for images of leaning smokestacks.  I had been looking at pictures of derelict buildings.  It seemed to me that there ought to be images of large smokestacks leaning in a threatening way.  I suppose it was through the magical spiderworks of Google that I came upon a Jean Cocteau film, "Le Sang d'un poete", which purports to show show the journey within a poets mind during the time it takes a large smokestack to fall to the ground.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAqxEq4ylb4

How to catch monsters.

Dreamed about a book that (I think) was about how to catch monsters.  I saw a red monster on a red raft in a red ocean.  I think a good way to catch them would be to put out piles of stinky gym socks, with some sort of a lasso buried in the middle.  When they came out of the dark to feast on the stinky socks, you pull the rope from within your fortress of pillows and blankets.  Something like that.

Trapped in the 80s with my Ex

Old married couple on the verge of getting divorced get caught in a time vortex and transport back to their younger selves. They have to decide whether their imperfect lives are worth protecting the timeline from change. Hilarity ensures as they discover what they thought was their past was not quite as they remember.

Be the space in which dragons dwell

http://blog.shambhala.com/category/daily-wisdom/ocean-of-dharma/

Today during meditation, I was asked what I desire. Not much, really. But thus is a place of playing with desire, so I thought, "OK, I wouldn't mind being able to heal people. Or help people heal." I heard the words and SAW the light-filled void. "Be the great space in which dragons fly." And I saw black and gold dragons flying, the must powerful agents of change. And I remembered Nisargadatta's advice to become the space behind these appearances (I'm paraphrasing). And I remembered that familiar, light-filled void. The non-being that underlies being. And now every place I turn, I see references to space.

5 AM Noontime

I love the dreams where the sun is in the wrong place in the sky.  I'm getting so good at picking that one out.  Last night, I dreamed Pilar told me it was five in the morning.  I was going to the bathroom for a pee, and I noticed that the sun was high over the skylight.

"Nope, this is a dream," I shouted over my shoulder as I went in the bathroom.
"What?" asked Pilar, because she was halfway across the house (the dream) and couldn't hear.
"It can't be five in the morning, because the sun is too high," I shouted.
"Well that's what the clock says."

Everything DID seem just like reality to me.  I looked down at my penis as I finished my pee.  It looked the same as ever.  Often in dreams, things kind of shifted.  Sometimes these differences (like the position of the sun in the sky at 5 AM) One time I became aware I was dreaming because I had a ridiculous hard-on that was strangely blade-shaped.

Well that wasn't the case here, but there was no denying the noontime rays of sun coming through the skylight.  I decided not to pursue the conversation further with dream-Pilar, lest I get distracted and lose lucidity within the dream.

Lucid dreams are startling, because Everything Is So Damn Real.  When I first started having them, I did the usual stuff: fly, try to have sex with people, run around like a nut.  But now when I find myself in one, I just really enjoy going with the flow of whatever the dream is, enjoying the richness of detail... inspecting my surroundings carefully... (but not TOO carefully... you have to take little glances at things and just stabilize with the flow of things.... stay nice and steady.)

One time, I held my lucidity past the point where the dream collapsed.  When a dream collapses, it's like you're somersaulting backwards into a void.  Usually I lose it at this point, or lots of time even before this point.  However, on this occasion, I maintained my steady awareness of things right into and through the dissolution of the dream world as it dissolved around me.  Before I knew it, I was in another scene, and I was still aware.

Another time, I held my normal awareness right from wakefulness, right through sleep into a dream.  That was pretty cool.  I kind of flew into the back area of a delivery van.  The driver was having some kind of difficulty, so I helped him steer the thing a bit to the side of the road.  It was like my entry into his world disoriented him somehow, because once we were pulled over, he seemed fine.  I exited the delivery van, and he took off again, leaving me to walk around this unfamiliar neighborhood where there was some kind of flea market.  I walked up to one of the booths and started talking to a teenaged girl who stared at me with barely disguised contempt.  I didn't reveal who I was or what the circumstances were of my visit, but I got the sense that at some basic level she knew that I didn't belong there.  Other times I have had dreams where I engaged with the people in the dream world, they usually didn't seem to demonstrate much agency or self-awareness.  The only character who ever listened with interest to me was my son Hunter.

One time I had a lucid dream that Hunter was in.  I told him that I was actually having a dream, and he said, "Wow!  Well what do you think we should do?"  I told him I thought we ought to just go somewhere and have breakfast, so that's what we did.  While we were in the restaurant, he asked if I was going to tell the people in the dream that "this is a dream".  I said, "Sure, why not?"  I stood up in the middle of the restaurant and made an announcement in a loud voice, but people didn't really pay much attention, other than to look over at me, then return to what they were doing.  I don't remember what happened after that... probably the dream disintegrated because of me speaking in a loud voice and doing something so socially awkward.

ARTificial Intelligence

Just woke up from a dream I had in which I was looking at a photograph.  There was one of those codes in the photograph that allowed one to go online, and the page had information regarding the photographers light setting, lens, plus links to an archive of alternate images. This sort of information is already available in properties of different images.

It made me think: what if artists, craftspeople, discoverers of all types had an easy and efficient way to tag their work in such a way that others could quickly find their image (or I suppose textual article, diagrams, blueprints, etc.)

This would have an obvious benefit to the consumer-as-artist, because it would aid their self-guided journey of learning.  For instance, if someone was interested in pinhole photography, or painting techniques similar to that of Monet's Haystacks.  Local artists that taught classes might be picked up in such a search perhaps.

Someone working for an ad agency might also need something themed "haystacks" or that used pinhole photography.

Benefit to artist or craftsperson: by tagging so as to be included in this database would be opportunity to sell some work to a business who needed such an image or creation that they could make.

I think much of this database technology already exists:  meta tags, image search.