Going Home

You never can really go home.  Or can you?

One of the inevitabilities of getting older is that you have more past to reflect upon.  New friends enter while others move on. You experience changes in pop culture, fashion fads, and shifts in political thought. You can even track the changes if you watch close enough. I see them happening around me every day.  I see my hair slowly thinning (thanks for the genes mom and dad), I feel time pass more quickly (grandma was right), and I can see the people and places around me transform into something new with each passing day.

Every once in a while, I indulge myself and allow for some time to really delve into my past.  I’ll go on Google Earth and zoom in on places I’ve lived to see how what they look like now.  Sometimes things look familiar. Sometimes they look drastically different. I was able to see the remains of what was once the Cloward Family cabin in Northern Utah.  The building, and old converted Mormon church my Grandparents purchased from the LDS church no longer belonged to my family when it burned to the ground. Seeing the remains in a picture taken from a satellite miles above the planet confirmed the feeling that I can never revisit this place. Pictures and the memories I have of this building and the many weekends and summer days I spent there are all that remain of a place that was so much a part of my childhood.

What is it about looking back on the past that makes us so nostalgic? Is it the sense of lost time that will never be regained? Maybe it’s just that we don’t remember the heartaches as much as we remember the joyful occasions. Whatever the cause, the past can become a potent pill that, when taken, can drug a person into a comma of reminiscing that may last hours or even days. Although it’s important to learn from the “good old days,” I believe it’s even more important to look to the future. Future opportunities are more exciting than past ventures, and the future is still in our control.

I’ve moved eleven times in my life, yet I’ve always been able to find comfort in the people around me. I believe people need people, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to create small pockets of friends wherever I go. We are able to lean on one other when times are not as good as we hope they will be. Friends may change with time, but I’ve found that relationships built on strong foundations can endure, no matter what time may bring.

It is said that home is where the heart is. In a sense, home is wherever you need or want it to be. It can be people, a building, a city, or a place of employment. With everything that changes, home provides stability, something to hold on to.  It can be re-associated with new surroundings and people as the world around us changes. If we’re willing to put in the effort, it is something we can have complete control over.  We have the ability to make a home wherever we’re at. 

My advice is to learn from, but don’t dwell on the past.  Spend your time looking toward the future. Surround yourself with good people, and you’ll find that no matter how the world changes you can always go home.

What are your thoughts?

Dreaming in High Definition 3-D

First of all, since this is my first blog entry of 2013, I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year.  I hope this year is a great one for you and yours.  Now to the good stuff!

I like to believe that my dreams are just memories from other lives I’ve lived.  It is because of this belief that I can happily say I’ve had the most amazing things happen to me and have lived the most adventurous lives. My dreams are incredibly vivid and, while I’m dreaming I often forget that I’m in a dream world. Once as a child, during an amazing dream, I pinched myself to see if the remarkable things that were happening to me were real. I felt it. For the rest of the dream I was convinced I was in the real world. Imagine my disappointment when I woke up.

Years ago, I began keeping a dream diary to help me remember my dreams at a later time. I don’t attempt to find deeper meanings in them, but I do want to remember some of the more fantastic ones for my writing. What I discovered when I started documenting them was that I couldn’t always understand what I had written. Often the writing was scribbled quickly in the dark and was hardly legible in normal light.

As I got older, technology improved and recording became easier. This was much better than writing. I could quickly record my thoughts and then fall asleep again to have another dream. I use this technique now to document my dreams.

Here’s a transcription of a one of my audio dream diary entries from last month:

“Um… I just woke up from really fun dream.  I think someone had a brain tumor and he was an old man.  He went to a different world.  Maybe this world was caused by the brain tumor.  There was a campground with these whales that you would jump in and swim with. That was cool.  Then there was an old man who had all these miniatures.  There were whole towns with these miniatures and trains and things. Then he left to go to this campground.  It was like a summer camp place and everyone had the same shirt on. At the camp, one of the girls was taken by a man. He lured her off with this weird looking lizard. She had been mean to the whales. She was going to get in the water with hair dye in her hair and everyone was upset. It would have hurt the whales.  The whales were big but not really.  I think they were a magical type of whale. Anyway, she was bad and was sent to her cabin but was lured off by this man with the lizard. He was a show performer or something. I decided I would chase him down and figure out where they would be performing next. So I go, go, go, go, go. I run into some people who knew the man and they say “oh, he’s going to be performing at this one place.” I go to the theater and end up having a sword fight with a fake sword and this guy. While I’m doing this I tie up this rope to the main curtain and lifted him up. At this point the girl and I were gone. Then we got lost but this guy’s sword fighting friends help us leave because they didn’t want to work for him anymore. Then the whole world was going to blow up because someone had sent a bomb to the old man’s house with the miniatures. I think we were in the miniatures. Then they send someone to find it and the old man ends up sending the young man back in time only to find out at the end that the old man is the young man from the future with a brain tumor and the little girl was his wife. The whales were really cool though. They were a lot of fun. They were fresh water whales because we were in the mountains.”

Now, don’t judge this story too harshly. Remember I recorded it at 4:32 in the morning. Yes, even to me it sounds like the ravings of a 5 year old child. Not only does it demonstrate how strange my dreams can be, but also how incoherent I am when I wake up in the middle of the night. Although in all honesty, I could potentially pull a good story from this strange string of thoughts.

So, now that you’ve seen into my dreams, what are some strange things about yours?