Coping: Notes from My “Other Life” (woo-woo)

It’s not often that I will have to think about writing-up an adventure in my personal life, but this is one of those almost unbelievable stories that it took me a good part of Monday morning wrapping my own head around.

The dream was like many others I’ve had.  I think of them almost as my “Other Life.”  That’s where the inspiration for my first David Shannon novel “DreamOver: Action-Adventure on the Frontiers of Reality” came from. My adventures.

Those will be featured in the second novel when I get time to write it:  CoDreamers and it’s based on the Light Crown Project I told you about a while back.  Other books to write first, though.

Point is, I am the prototype for the DreamOver novel…not perfectly, of course, but close enough.  The dreams, including the one Sunday night into Monday morning, are not the “usual” slap-dash collection of daily leftover bits of this and that being rationalized, but instead are full-on immersive with IMAX-like enveloping/surround video and a cast of characters that mainly seem to feature people I’ve known over the course of my lifetime who are (incidentally) dead.

(More after this)

I realize this is not particularly remarkable in itself, but this dream in particular had a McGuffin to the plot that blew my socks off.

If you’re not a writer, a McGuffin is a British writing terms that describes “an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.”

Since you probably have a fair idea that I live a (more or less) normal life on “this side” of the waking state, let me run your through the dream step-by-step and both the McGuffin and the Woo-Woo will slap you upside the head.

I had wakened about midnight, had a sip of water and a time-check (11:58) and decided I needed more sleep…With nothing particular on my mind, I went back to sleep.

Suddenly, there I was in the presence of a white-haired, but fit man who I knew “ran the company” I worked for.  He was talking to me sternly about “sales reports” for the region (in the dream) that I was managing.

In my “other world” I apparently do several different things very similar to what I’ve done on this side of sleep.  I’ve managed sales forces, been a broadcaster, and done lots of other damn interesting things…which show up as contexts for my adventures in the Sleep Realms.

I was aware that Elaine and I were “together” on this other side of things.  We had a large, comfortable home in an area similar to Bellevue, Washington.  Big sprawling totally remodeled 1960’s type Northwest brick rambler.  I didn’t have to work but I enjoyed it.

The specific problem was that this man in the dream, who looked and sounded like the program director (P.D.) from a radio station I worked at in the 1970’s, was pointing out how I was being “too soft” of the people reporting to me from the “Seattle Branch.”

Tacoma, and my other “locations” were fine, no problem.

The setting was we were in a very nice restaurant where we had a few drinks, talked, and came up with some ideas.

A couple of other businessmen were sitting at the table to my right and we chit-chatted for a few minutes with them.  At that moment the food showed up.  Jay, the P.D. was having a steak.  I had something lighter, but I don’t remember what.

Then he looks at me with a twinkle in his eye and hands me a distorted looking Kindle. (McGuffin!).

It wasn’t just a normal Kindle, however: It was about twice as fall.  Picture a taller Kindle Fire about 18” in length and you’ve got it.

As he handed it to me he said “I’m also instructing you to read the poem The Penitent Man.

Glancing at the Kindle, I could make out it was a poem.  But he stopped me and said “When you get back, when you get back…”

WTF?

Naturally, right then I woke up.  It was 4:38 AM so I went through my morning routine:  Stack of vitamins, fresh perked coffee, feed the cat, reheat a slice of leftover shrimp pizza…

At 4:59:08 I sat down in front of the b ig UHD screen in the music studio thinking “Well, let’s just see about the Penitent Man poem crap…”

I wasn’t expecting a thing.

Now comes another one of those “Push George Over with a Feather” moments.

The first was the discovery that it (The Penitent Man) was a movie that I didn’t even know existed.  Came out in 2010.

Then came the real shocker:  Available for Kindle, a book of poems titled  The Penitent Man: A Collection Of Christian Poetry.

The Penitent Man

The day starts off in agony

And only gets worse from there.

I grapple lines of poetry

Grasp straw’s that aren’t there

I walk the wire over sin

The path is straight, the thread is think

At once I feel I’m falling in

Till I’m drowning in despair

The afternoon is an endless fight

It’s a careful balancing act

The phone and mail and heaps to write

Are enough to make me crack

The devil tugs upon my sleeve

Reminding me he will not leave

Until his message I believe

And won’t get off my back…

There is more, of course.  But if you want it, there’s the link.

The point of this morning’s little epistle is perhaps summed up by the Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth.”

We’ll let you know when it gets clearer and doesn’t come in a flash.

Ahead for Peoplenomics Subscribers

Ure has a new book pouring out of his fingers.  Non-fiction.  It’s working title is “What’s After the Fire Department” and it’s a long-time scale survey of what’s changing at the fire house. New tech roles are in the wings.  I’ll post Chapter 1 for subscribers this weekend.

Elaine’s about finished with proofing the Millennial’s Missing Manual, so maybe that will land on Amazon next week.

Wednesday’s Peoplenomics rolls out a really cool evolution on the technology front.  I call it “Responsive Video” to pin a label on it.  Huge trend-changer that the tech press hasn’t focused much on.

Whew…Write when you get rich,

George@ure.net

8 thoughts on “Coping: Notes from My “Other Life” (woo-woo)”

  1. Wow.. speaking of woo woo.. and dreams..
    I had a huge dream about an earthquake.. all the while the earth quake was going on there was a hole with a lot of devastation..
    all the while this was going on people were sitting in a restaurant eating a meal and once in a while gazing into the hole of devastation while making whimsical comments..

  2. You know, we are only a little more than 4 years on from the supposed “End of Time” of December 21, 2012.

    I did not put much stock in the catastrophic theories running around at the time, but something nagged me about the whole thing and I read a lot about various theories of the possible mechanism of supposed transformation.

    My intuition has gotten sharper these past few years. Perhaps the veil between planes, lives, then and now, far and near, has gotten ‘thinner’.

  3. St. Augustine writes in “The City of God” that the only the penitent man can become a prophet. Since dreams are often cryptic, perhaps the instruction to ‘read the penitent man’ really means to read the dream/prophecy to learn what the dream really is saying. If time travel exists at all, perhaps it may only be in our dreams. I don’t mean time travel ‘is’ just a dream, but that the nature of the subconscious mind may not be bound by the tenets of everyday ‘awake’ linear time. The dreaming mind may be able to access various alternate futures while in the dream state (in which most adults spend 25-33% of their lives experiencing, so why would this ‘time’ be wasted?) For example, in the Jewish Torah, Christian New Testament and Islamic Quran, prophets often experience the ‘word’ of their God in their dreams, or through dream-like visions. The ‘word of God’ may be code for the ‘divinely received’ messages and info conveyed via dreams/visions about impending future events.

  4. Herbal scent dream inducer? I stumbled on this yesterday when referring to my “The Homebrewer’s Companion” and thought of George: paraphrasing – to make a dream pillow stuff 2oz of your favorite dried whole hops,2oz chamomile flowers, 2oz rosebuds,1oz mugwort, 1oz lemongrass, (large chunks crushed or chopped).5oz benzoin into 2 double layered 6″ X 8″ cheesecloth bags and sew into a tightly woven outer cover. The author warns: “Sleep with the dream pillow near your bed pillows and be warned that your dreams may be so intense that you go back to having a beer before bedtime instead”.

  5. Good to hear I’m not the only one who has “Radio sales” dreams. Some of them are nightmares!
    George, since you’re the most experimental soul I know of, you should check out the “Hemi-Sync” series available from the Monroe Institute. My wife bought the OBE series for my birthday and it has some very interesting effects.

  6. You may like to read ‘Anyone else visit Mall world in their dreams’ on the ever odd godlikeproductions. Cheers.

  7. My dreams seem like a second life to me. Unfortunately they vanish within minutes after wakening. I always marvel at those (super smart!!) characters that appear again and again that are so much more competent than I myself ;-( in what they are doing in my dreams; speaking fluent foreign languages that are know to me just vaguely, or do engineering math that I’ve forgotten 30 years ago. And to top it off, I don’t recall ever seeing these dream people in real time.

  8. Hello, George,
    Hopefully, ‘what’s changing at the fire house’ is the adoption of US Navy firefighting techniques, namely, the use of ‘double teams’. One team with a ‘fog applicator’ to shield Team Two, allowing them to get close enough to the flames to have an actual effect. You see, on a ship, there is no choice to just ‘let it burn out’. Hypothermia or sharks are one’s only choices should the firefighting efforts fail. It’s a great motivator! The civvies could learn a lot, just as the USN learned from the devastating fire on the USS Forrestal (CV-59) in the Gulf of Tonkin, July 1967.

    Regards,
    Robert

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