After a million miles, I still return to the garden

Spring wants to come, but it is still cold.

I am feeling introspective this morning, as a result of one of what I call the 'million miles' dreams - like I've lived days and months and years in a movie-like realistic experience.  The experience comes complete with books, movies, clothes, people, conversations, stores, driving, maps, cooking, laundry.. everything except sleep.. realistic places and things that are not quite real and I know they aren't but I just can't break out until some certain circumstance.  I had one the night before last that only lasted 'two weeks' dream time, but the one last night was months, maybe a year.. and so slippery I can only grasp thoughts before they slide away.

When I wake up I feel like I've lived a 'million miles' elsewhere and wonder about the coherence of space time and reality.  I'm relieved, and confused, and curious and exhausted all at the same time.   I worry a little about my memory, which on many things is so sharp and clear and organized and then on many other things it feels like I'm sorting through soft cheese to find the bits that matter and ignoring the rest hoping it will "reboot' and be useful for something.

I know it is my photographic memory and stress and some sort of cosmic whack-a-mole all combining to create that and that it isn't real time.  98% of the time I can separate real time and dream time.. but there are things that sometimes seem a bit too real - like looking at the (non-extant) scar on my face in the bathroom of an apartment I didn't rent in the 90s, waking up only because I realized that my keys were not MY keys.. as I saw myself walk in the door holding a bag of groceries..

There are even titles of books and magazine articles that turn out to be entirely in my own dream (this is rare for dreams, I've read.. to read entire things in dreams, website URLS, phone numbers and addresses, children's books with pictures.. it all fades away and I can't keep much of it.. some of it I write down as my stories that I am publishing again soon).  I even hear and read things in other languages in my dreams, but not often, and usually as a result of something in 'the real world' having had a good dose of it.  I'm still waiting for the moment I grab a book randomly off a shelf and it is empty inside, or lorem ipsum or something like that... but so far, in dreams and reality the books have all been complete, sometimes even to having the copyright page and year inside.

 I often have said that I keep all the things of this world 'in my head' so that this plastic dinosaur, although lovely, doesn't have to be in my physical hand to hold onto the sense of it.. but in my dreams I guess I take that to the next level recombining and recreating everything down to the plastic dinosaur or book, or endtable, a collection of keys or pocket change or fabric pattern. 

The pizza box in my dream last night was from a television show I had watched earlier in the day - and at the point I made that connection I was able to initiate waking up.

What do I think about when I boil it all down through years lived but not lived?
What stands out about this world the most?

Family.  Time.  Growing Things.  Repetition.  Math (matrices, sine patterns, exponential curves, scatter patterns, spatial patterns both in and not in crystalline form).  Space (The feel of real space around me, touch, cause and effect, conditions and improvements).  Doing Things that alter time and space, randomness, spontaneity, things that are unexpected vs orderly progressions.

There is something about the math - bits that come in the dreams and chemistry and other things that I know I don't consciously understand and probably never will.  It is a 'dream' within the dreams.. something that teases me but I will never have enough time to focus on and figure out.  I feel the taste of it and then let it go.. and concentrate on the other big thoughts - family, growing things, doing things in the real time before me. 

I am going through my seed vault and looking at potential, while a little bit of my mind is still turning over all the other ideas.

I do this every year, work some varieties, see the seeds germinate in the earth and grow along their potential, unfurling leaves, flowering, setting fruit and seed.. different weather patterns and phenotype and nurture every year - some years flourish, some drought or mold or bugs .. some things produce and others do not -  eventually I let Nature take back over and the weeds come up and the earth returns to Fall and Winter to go over again.  But there is a concreteness to this, too - and a tie down to time in a succession of months of regular progression.

I am thinking right now about tilling the earth when it is warm - days or weeks or a million miles twelve times over from now.

I am thinking right now of little girl coming home from school in the afternoon, better from the cold and sinus that have been awful for her and Mark this week.  I am thinking of the flowers growing and the snow yesterday, and the water sound from the freezer this morning, and that tomorrow I run the mail again.

And I am thinking that today, is today, and reminding myself that a million miles of lucid dreaming did not exist for everyone else - I am not in the Planet of the Apes staring at the Statue of Liberty thousands of years in the future (although, honestly, there are days it feels like that)... Today is one day after yesterday, and two days after the day before that... and so forth and so on.