dream a little dream

My method of teaching Jispa to combat nightmares is giving me nightmares. As I have earlier blogged, all I do is change the channel. Basically I can change my dreams at will. If the nightmare is getting to me I invent an interesting way to get off it. So when Jispa was first having nightmares I told her that you can simply change it.
So now she thinks about solving her nightmares. Yesterday night after a long time she came and woke me up in the middle of the night. “Dad” pat pat pat.. She had to get me to wake up. “Dad, I need to solve this bad dream”. Oh ok. It was a chase kind of sequence. A ha. I was lucky that’s the easy one. If someone is chasing you and you want to get away, all you have to do is think up some real easy thing – like a rope can appear from anywhere taking you out, or you can cross some river which they cant or something. It’s pretty simple. Some one can give you a magic potion that can turn them into something more benign. The chase ones are pretty cool. It all depends on the settings. Are you watching a sci-fi or an urban setting or a fantasy? There is always a lovely creative way out.
Jispa interestingly sees it or has interpreted it as ‘solving’ the bad dream. She looks for a solution to the dream. I am not sure if like me she can merely put the solution on the dream itself seamlessly. I think she has break it to solve it and bang its gone.
The tough ones for me are the abstract dreams, which give you the scare like nightmares. They … I don’t know… I think they kind of keep the heart rate up and tense your brain a bit. But all you dream is patterns, these repeating patterns create some kind of tension. It’s something I have had since I was a kid. Now I rarely dream them. I normally get them when I am unwell. So on some nights, probably after Chinese food dinners or something similar, when I get them, I tend to like them. I keep dreaming them. It’s like paying money to watch a horror film. More like a thriller movie. It keeps you on the edge. It’s kind of weird. These dreams I can’t will to happen but when they do I seize the moment. What I find funny is that as I write this blog I realise that I do all this in my sleep.
My wife finds all this pretty funny. She knows I am nuts in any case. This is one more proof. Both my sister and I can change dream channels. And my brother claims that he gets no dreams at all. What a weird family.
A ha… one dream I cannot change is being ill prepared for an exam. That one requires me to get up and remind my self that I need give those exams any more. I need to be semi awake and get my reassurance from my memory. Schooling has me permanently scarred. I don’t know how much else it gave me.
Yesterday I was speaking to a good friend. She was teaching her child to write while she was talking to me. The child was just a little under four. She was getting him to do home work. What shit? Home work for a 4 year old. that too on writing numbers. She was going nuts. I kept telling in the entire conversation to back off. She was like ‘the school is putting too much pressure. He needs to do this home work. It was to be submitted tomorrow. You don’t know. Tomorrow if he fails every one will ask me. And on and on.’ Poor thing. I know her. She is not like that as a person. It’s the school that made her so. It is the school which is putting the pressure on the mother to bring out the kali in her. At the end I left the argument with a simple advice. Do what you want to do and what you believe in. Please do not let the school do what you think you must not. You choose and try and keep the school out of your sphere of influence. That’s all. The penny sunk. She said yes. Wow. My day was made.
I try my best to think of my values, my thought process, and my beliefs. I try not to let the school, the peer and the others get in the way. Sure I am open to stimuli, but then that’s that… stimuli. It is easier said than done. You struggle all the time. You don’t know most of the time why you have acted. I try and keep centred when I am in trouble or in conflict while parenting. It is bloody difficult. But I know I must. I have to. I don’t want to give someone nightmares. No way.