It is 7am Sunday 11-Dec-11 here.

Last night after posting here I went to sleep after nidnight. I thought about holding nice, comfortable, round-golf-balls, (or bigger) of chalk as I dropped-off.

I woke with no dream, as usual. But I thought to myself, "Don't try to hard too remember just believe it will unfurl during the day".

Then

I remembered being on the slope of a mountain with others. We were like a school geology-class on excursion. We were told to look for and collect specimins of rock.

In the dream I saw chunks of hand-sized white rock. I picked up a few but dropped them again because I wanted some thing rounder.

Then the rocks around me became rounder but I didn't want boring white hand-size rock, I wanted darker rocks.

I began seeing exciting dark blue and black chunks of roundish hand-sized rocks. I picked some up and filled a little white bag.

It was time to go and I was so proud of what I collected that I became a little nervous that someone might covet my lovely rocks and try to "aquier", (steal them). But then I remembered we were just a high school geology class on an excursion to collect rocks so I stopped being nervous and relaxed.

Just now this reminded me of something I read in Lobsang Ramper long ago where he said that when he was a little kid in school, in Tibet, he and his siblings would go to a special place in the mountains to collect chalk for use in school.

Ha! I found it. Here it is. Chapter One "Early Days at Home" page 19 of his first book, The Third Eye. Published the year before I was born 1958.

"Our schoolroom was quite large, at one time it had been used as a refactory for visiting monks, but since the nee buildings were finished, that particular room had been made into a school for the estate. Altogether there were about sixty children attending. We sat cross-legged on the floor, at a.table, or long bench, which was about eighteen inches high.

We sat with our backs to the teacher, so that we did not know when he was looking at us. It made us work hard all the time. Paper in Tibet is hand made and expensive, far to expensive too waste on children.

We used slates, large thin slabs about twelve inches by fouteen inches. Our "pencils" were a form of hard chalk which could be picked up in the Tsu La Hills, some twelve thousand feet higher than Lhasa, which was already twelve thousand above sea-level.

I used to try and get the chalk with the redish tint, but sister Yaso was very fond of a soft purple. We could obtain quite a number of colours: reds, yellows, blues, and greens. Some of the colours, I believe, were due to the presence of metalic ores in the soft chalk base. Whatever the cause, we were glad to have them."