13

Often the number 13 evokes a sense of intense fear and danger by those who come across it in their everyday lives. The number brings forth images of black cats, women pinned to stakes, ladders, breaking mirrors and just a general feel of ominous doom. Whether you come across it in calculating finances, planning a party, or choosing a house or car, if something is suggestive towards this lowly-regarded number being the sum of whatever it is you're doing, chances are that at first sight of it you'll be running for the hills, far far away, along with the rest of herd.

I, usually, am part of this herd.

If we're looking at houses, I won't want one that has 13 in the address. With cars, I add up the numbers on the reg: if the total comes to 13, again, I consider it a bad sign. (Don't get me started on cars with three of the same number, the number that comes after 5 but before 7 - shudder).

I don't know why I tend to diverge from this number. I think over time I've just gone along with the flow and joined in with the rest of the hype about the number: I've actually heard that Italians consider it a lucky number. Growing up, Red had a bit of a fear about it, and she kept seeing signs of it everywhere: dates, the time, even the number of letters in her first and last name added up to 13. (Teenage girls have a lot of time on their hands).

Another friend I grew up with, got her first period on Friday the 13th. Faaaarrrrrrr. She was secretly rapt, I know, being a bit of a late bloomer and all, but I was just like "What? Friday the 13th? Of all days?!"

I've ended up having my birthday on the 13th a couple of times, just the way the dates worked out that year, and I can't say anything really horrible happened. But if given the option, I would always go for the other option, rather than outright choose something with 13 associated with it.

(I think the stories of my parents upbringing got me really superstitious and stuff too.)

However, I'm starting to see things differently. Today is a 13 number for me, and a great number at that.

Including today, I only have 13 more working days until I go on leave next month.

:-D! :-D! :-D!

YIPPEE for me! I am so excited. When I start preparing my to-do list of holiday stuff, I think I might spontaneously explode with the amount of items I will be potentially ticking off.

And because Hubbie isn't able to take holidays with me, as he has only recently started a new job, I will be on my own, getting lots of little bullshit jobs done. I'll be organising photos, cleaning windows, sorting through recipes and indexing them, throwing out old bills, EVERYTHING!

You think I'm crazy now don't you? You think I'm going to devote my time off to just cleaning the house? No siree!

I'm gonna be catching up with my parents, my sister, my cousins, my extended family, my friends, the works! On Hubbie's days off, we're going to go out and not come home until it's dark! I'm going to be watching my fave tv shows and movies 'til REALLY late at night, because I won't have work the next day! I'll be shopping, trying on dresses with Red for her wedding, going to parks, to the beach, eating out and most important drinking coffee and eating cake and ice cream!

!!!!!

I am going to do it all, whenever, however and wherever I like! :-D

Oh, and I almost forget. I'll be finishing off my book then too, you know that story I keep mentioning. Yeah......

:-D

Which brings me to another 13. I finished chapter 12 last night.

:-D :-D :-D

Crazy Eye

I am not kidding or exaggerating in the least when I say that for the last three weeks, my right eye has been twitching on and off.


I say on and off (thank goodness) because you could imagine my utter embarrassment if it was actually twitching non-stop. I wouldn't be able to leave the house in fear of scaring off people with my wildly flailing eye.

At first I thought my crazy-eye twitching was as a result of hearing or speaking of something unfavourable, something or someone I didn't like, hence the name 'crazy eye.' This deduction came to mind after talking to my mum about an annoying cousin, and noticing that my right eye was twitching. That was my first 'A-ha!' moment.

My next moment came in a fit of road rage over stupid incompetent drivers, where also, lo and behold, I noticed the now all too familiar eye twitch.

However, despite my little nickname for this sudden deformity I've developed, I don't believe it to be caused by anything. That is, my eye twitch resulting from being mad or upset. This eye twitch does not discriminate: home, work, family, friends, happy, sad..... no matter how I'm feeling, where I am or who I'm talking to, my right eye will just begin to twitch of it's own accord.

(It's even twitching right now, I'm not freaking kidding!)

I used to believe that your right eye twitching was an indicator of good things to come, you know, like superstition, the way someone might believe that seeing a dove is a sign of good fortune. I think I read it in one of those dream books that decipher dream meanings. However I'm inclined to lean towards my mums belief, only because hey, she's my mum and she knows 'stuff' and has a WHOLE lot more experience than me. She believes that it's in fact your left eye that brings you luck, and that your right eye twitching is a BAD sign.


Dum, da dum da.


She has experience in these matters you see, as a result of having grown up in a heavily-superstitious environment/time/culture, as mentioned in a much earlier post. So I take most of her stories at face value.

The fact that my eye has been twitching though for 3 weeks now, I can't help but thinking that it means neither good, or bad (I know, as literally crazy as it sounds) but that it may be as simple as some kind of weird twitch.

It's just that I keep getting these random flashes in my mind of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining," where he's experiencing an eye twitch after his hallucinations have transgressed him into an outrageous other-worldly realm.

Am I turning into some psycho-weird mad-woman right eye twitcher? Influenced by stupid people over the last year, whose behaviours have turned me into an enraged bottled-up fuel of emotions, whose only physical outlet is the right eye twitching?


Stay tuned to this mad woman.

My Weird Dream

Two nights ago I had this weird dream. Weird not because of what I dreamt, I think it was more weird due to the emphasis of what happened, particularly since it wasn't something extraordinary that happened in the dream.




In my dream, which I think involved high school themes, (as in people from high school, the buildings at the school, etc, it's all quite a blur as dreams usually are) I could see myself. Not like seeing myself in an out-of-body context, but you know where you can see yourself doing things in your dream? Yeah like that. Only I actually saw myself, peering around the corner at myself. Yes weird number one, me looking at me.

There was also someone there, or more than one person there I'm not too sure, but it was someone from my high school days, that's the vibe I got. I think perhaps two dreams got mixed up there. (!) And as my sneaky self watched around the corner at my unaware self, my unaware self, just dressed in casual clothes, with my hair tied up in a ponytail, started to sneeze.

Once, twice, three times.

And not a little 'achoo.' These sneezes were with feeling. They were big, grand, and each one was a bit stronger than the last. I remember the last one quite clearly. As I breathed in deeply, I sneezed for the third time, and after it I exhaled, heavily, like that sneeze had taken every bit of emotion and energy out of me. I almost looked tired.



And that was it.



So can you see why I find it weird?



I like to analyse dreams, and try to work out my own in the process. I guess growing up, and listening to my parents tell stories from their childhood, has heavily influenced me. They grew up in a decade, country and time where people heavily spoke of "things" happening. There were ghost stories, only they weren't just made up fables to keep the kids from being too curious and adventurous, designed to keep them indoors and out of trouble. No, the stories they spoke of were of events that had happened, either to them, or someone they knew.

I know what you're thinking, and no, they're not urban legends, as familiar as the line "it happened to my mum's father..." sounds. I know this for sure, even though I haven't lived through it myself. My parents are not the sort to deliberately frighten you, and so the fact that they even told these stories, means there is some meaning to them. In fact, if as a child I had said, in response to one of these tales, "I'm scared to sleep now," instead of saying, "it was only a story," I would get a response like, "just don't think about it, that was then."

Just that thought alone makes me more confident in everything I've ever heard. I don't know why I don't hear stories of things like that happening nowadays, but part of me thinks, in line with The Secret, that the more you talk about a certain thing and believe in it, the more that thing will come to you. As people don't talk much about superstition nowadays, especially compared to let's say a century ago, I think these incidences don't occur as often. And when they do, in the new millenium of technology, they are ignored or not spoken of.

I might have even myself wondered whether or not my grandparents made up stories to scare my mum and dad when they were kids. But the fact that some of these stories actually come from my parents' experiences directly, supports my faith in them.

What are these "things" you may ask? Incidences involving a whole lot of spooky stuff, to sum it up. Lots of superstition, dark "things," black cats, and spirits, influenced quite heavily by religion. By this I mean that any sort of blasphemy or disrespect towards God brought about heavy penalties, in the form of weird things happening to the offender.

Along with these superstitions and stories, dreams were also looked at and analysed in the process, in order to gain an insight into why things happened, and what could happen in the future. When I think of some of the dreams I've heard, some of them so literal to the point that death in the dream actually resulted in death and life meant life, well, there's really no way to deny or ignore the truth. Although some dreams are literal, and other more of a metaphor to summarise something happening in your life, or something about to happen, I think it's hard to say there is no meaning.



And so, in coming back to my dream, it's because of all this that I take such interest in analysing them. My immediate thought, in thinking of my dream, was that it was such an ordinary event, but as I said, the emphasis on the ordinary, MADE it that much more interesting.

Firstly the sneeze. I thought "that's good." Good, because I saw it as an expression, something good coming out. I thought of what sneezes mean, and by that I don't mean that you have an itch in your nose and you get an urge to sneeze, I mean that with my parents, we have a common belief that if you or someone else is talking and one of you sneezes, what had been recently spoken of was true. Yes, a belief from the old school days. Every time we're talking and someone sneezes, my mum will say in her native tongue, "truth." So naturally, "truth" came to my mind when I started analysing.

I was at work when my dream came back to me, so I started looking up online dream dictionaries. I was curious about what some of the meanings of sneezing in your dream would mean.

One of the first web sites I came across defined this as something happy and joyful happening in my life. So that matched with my first assumption of what it meant.

But as I continued to search, not content with just the one definition, I started to look at my dream more deeply.

I thought of the fact that my hair was up - that was the first huge indicator for me. Hair generally means problems, so the fact that it was tied up and out of my way, suggested to me that some problems were going to be out of the way. And the hair being up, IS significant, as my everyday preference is wearing it down.

Secondly, I thought of the way in how I sneezed. It was with a lot of energy. The sneezing could represent a release of some kind, something from within me coming out. So that coupled with the emotion I did it with, I started to look at my dream from the perspective that some problem in my life, was going to go away. Something negative presently, was going to come out.

And yes, almost every other sneezing definition I found was also supporting that theory. All web sites pointed to sneezing being a metaphor for something being released, a negative something or someone leaving your life. A great web site I found in the midst of all this searching was sleeps.com. It made a lot of sense, and confirmed some dream-related queries I'd had for a while. Ever had a dream, look up the symbology in it and walk away wondering, "hmm, I don't know that I'm going to be starting another line of studying, but hey if the dream definition says so....." and the definition is just so not compatible with your current life, that you have to wonder? Well I raise my hand here. This site, and many others, were based around the central idea that you cannot reduce a dream you have to a single symbol, and you cannot go to a dictionary to find that symbol meaning, and expect it to relate to you. All dreams are subjective. A sneeze may mean release for me, but sickness to someone who has been sneezing lately. A range of things need to be looked at in order to analyse a dream, such as what the things in your dream mean to you, just in general, the word associations connected with your dream symbology, and a range of other things. A dream dictionary should only really be referred to if you have absolutely no association with something you dream of, if there is something you are especially neutral to.

Which makes absolute perfect sense. It's all about analysing the dream, and seeing what it means for you.

So in the end? I've come to the conclusion that given my every day association with sneezing, my dream symbology of hair, the emotion displayed in the dream, added with some of the definitions I found here and there on the web, that something negative, whether it be person or thing, will be released from my life soon. Which is great! I think this will bring out a lot of emotion, (hence the release from my sneeze) and the problem will be behind me once it is all over (the hair tied up).

There is A person in my life at the moment, who I am not particularly fond of. However this person is in the family, and so I don't know if they could really be put behind me forever. That is just not possible. However, perhaps my issue with them will be resolved. OR I may just give them a piece of my mind, and the WHOLE truth will come out. Now that's just scary.

I'll keep you informed if something happens. In the meantime, keep on dreamin'.