My re-introduction - it's great to be back!!!
Actually I never made an introduction before, so in a way this is it!
I left rather suddenly about a year ago, and I thought I should explain why and what's happened since then.
When I was here before, it was the darkest time in my life... my mom had learned she had the debilitating and fatal disease COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) and I had moved in with her to help take care of her in her final years. Basically a diagnosis of COPD means your life expectancy is about 4 years or so. But fortunately she had lived a long and very fulfilling life, and she had no regrets, and even had a very philosophical attitude about her impending death, which helped immensely. But still it was very hard to watch her slowly waste away, needing to be attached to an oxygen machine constantly.
To make things even harder to bear, my dog was very old and also nearing death... and my mom even commented a couple of times that she didn't know how I could stand being in this house of slow death. But I stayed strong for her and made her life as comfortable as I could, and I didn't even realize how much of a toll it was taking on me emotionally until after she passed away last august. There came a point where I felt like I was waking form a very long and terrible dream and was beginning to open up emotionally again - and it wasn't until then that I realized I had sort of shut myself down in order to bear up through it all.
So it was in the midst of this situation that I joined Dreamviews in 2009. Then sometime in the middle of 2010 things took a sudden turn for the worse... she began a series of emergency trips to the hospital interspersed with tests and therapy, but it was clear she was dying.
At this same time, my dream life had taken a bad turn. I wasn't having any more lucids, and just about every dream I did have was essentially telling me that I shouldn't be posting my dreams here for public viewing - they were all dreams of my privacy being invaded by strangers and such. It all seemed to come to a head at the same time, and I decided it was time to stop worrying about dreams and invest myself solidly in waking life.
Well, now I've buried my poor dog in the backyard of Mom's house, and I've scattered her ashes around the flowerbeds she used to tend there, as per her instructions. And I've inherited a duplex just up the street that I've become the landlord of, and taken in my sister's dog Pepper. It's been nearly a year now since mom passed away, and I've gotten over the main emotional mourning period, though I still miss her quite often.
I stopped keeping a DJ through those terrible months, but I did record a few of the more memorable ones. And now just a couple weeks ago I thought about this place and the friends I left behind here, and decided it's time to try to pick up where I left off... only this time I won't be posting a dream journal! :lol:
I had actually stopped everything I was doing that was dream-related, including chakra meditation and kundalini yoga, reality checks and thinking about dreams etc. But I'm getting back into it, and just now I'm reading Malcolm Godwin's excellent book The Lucid Dreamer: A Waking Guide for the Traveler Between Worlds. It's really amazing, and I highly recommend it... in fact I'd call it the best LD book next to EtWoLD (that I'm aware of anyway). It's sparked an interest for a few books by Carl Gustav Jung that I just ordered as well.
Well, guess that about covers it. Sorry this got so morbid, but hey... that's been my life, at least it was back then. I feel that my earlier time here taught me a lot (perhaps more than I realized), and now that things are less turbulent I'm ready to take the next steps on my journey to both sleeping and waking lucidity.
