For my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary, we hired someone to make a DVD of a bunch of family pictures set to music.  It was really very touching and cool.  And it ended up meaning a lot more than just memories.

During one section, the person who made the video (who doesn't know our family and didn't know the details that makes this story so amazing) had put "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" over some pictures of the grandkids.  But it nagged at her as she finished making it, and she even showed my Aunt and my Mom a rough draft with it on there.  Well, when she gave us the finished product, she mentioned she'd put a different song on.  She put Garth Brooks's song, "On a Prayer" instead of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."  The chorus goes like this:

"On a prayer, in a song, I hear your voice, and it keeps me hanging on.

Raining down, against the wind,

I'm reaching out till we reach the circles end, when you come back to me again."

The "On a prayer" part started during a picture that showed my cousin Jolene, who died of lukemia at age two, sixteen years ago.  The next picture showed up at the part where the lyrics said, "reaching out" and it was another picture of Jolene, reaching out one little hand.  Then it changed to a photo of my Grandpa holding her and the lyrics, "When you come back to me again," played.
We were all together watching the final version tonight, and we just sat there, stunned and crying at that part.  The woman who did the video had said she didn't know why, but she just felt like it was a better song and added it in last minute.  But it was too much of a coincidence that the only three pictures of Jolene at that section fit so perfectly with the music.  It was the most amazing thing ever, and I'm still a little teary over it.

I've been reluctant to write about this, because I'm not sure if I'm regressing or what.  In any case, I'm having dream problems.

Lately, I've been having a lot of dreams about someone I knew in highschool.  The proverbial "first love" of my teenage years.  I have not spoken to this person for probably eight years now.  All of a sudden, I start having dreams about running into him.  No big deal, just running into him at the store or something.  But then I wake up with this feeling like I'm forgetting something very important and that feeling digs in and stays.

I slept with Cordelia the dream doll under my pillow a few nights ago after I asked "tell me what, if anything, this means."  I woke up and couldn't remember dreaming at all, not even a vague clue of what it was about, and the feeling of having forgotten something very important.

So, this morning I dreamed about my dream cemetary.  I won't bore you with the details, but I have places I revisit in my dreams that don't exist in the real world but in my dreams they're always exactly the same.  So, I'm stumbling through my dream cemetary, and someone comes up with a Hackett yearbook and inside there's a message for me from him.  It wasn't even that important, it was like, "I hear Anna had a baby.  That's cool."  It ticked me off because nothing usually gets into my dream cemetary, it's usually a pretty decent place to be without stress of things from outside getting in.

Now, here's my theory, feel free to give me yours.  I think my subconcious is throwing him up as a representation of my teen years because shortly after I was with this person, I started making really poor choices in my life.  I was in this huge rush to grow up when I really wasn't ready.  Now, I am grown up, and I think my brain is telling me I rushed things along.  But how do I fix it without completely regressing?  If this is indeed the cause of these dreams.  I'm almost 100% sure of it.  There's a 2% margin of error for "ate too close to bedtime."

I was torn as to where to put this entry, here or in my normal xanga, but I decided here, since I feel more open about this kind of thing here.

Joe's grandfather was like, superman of WWII.  He went everywhere, did a ton of stuff, parachuted into danger and all of that.  He killed a bunch of nazis and brought home their trinkets.  Joe recently inhereted one of these souveniers (his grandfather isn't dead, but he's making sure all his war stuff goes to the right places for when the time comes).  It's a pair of binoculars (or "field glasses," as I learned when I called them binoculars.  Whatever, they're binoculars) grandpa Kay took off of a dead German officer.  Apparantly, they worked better than his, so he kept them and used them.  Now, he's given them to Joe.

There isn't a swastika on them or anything like that, nothing that would designate them as anything other than an old pair of binoculars.  But ever since Joe has brought them home and they've been in our house, I can't sleep.  At least, not well.  I feel constantly uneasy in that way you are when you're four years old, where you run from the bathroom to the bedroom with your eyes closed type thing.  Joe says it's my imagination, but I just feel like having something that belonged to a Nazi in my home is just... not cool.  I don't want him to not have this thing that belonged to his grandpa, but I don't like the way I feel with them here.

Is it my imagination?  If I didn't know the history of this object, would I still feel the same way?  Is this just my sense of righteous politically correct outrage objecting to having such a thing in my home?  Can an object really carry negative feelings because of its one time political alliance?

On the subject of a diferent grandpa, this one deceased, we went to my grandma's house yesterday.  On her table she has a picture of my grandpa who recently died, the one who hasn't caught the bus for the afterlife yet.  Christian pointed to it and said, "There a grandpa.  There a grandpa with a pumpkin patch."  Now, in the picture, grandpa isn't in a pumpkin patch, and he hasn't had a garden since before Christian was born.  I said, "Oh, did you hear mommy talking about grandpa's garden?" and he said, "No, I saw a pumpkin patch.  A grandpa pumpkin patch."  I wonder if he's been having dreams or something about my grandpa and his subconcious is creating memories for him.  He takes his plastic pumpkins from halloween out everyday and lines them up to walk through them and says, "A pumpkin patch, mommy!"  It's a little creepy.

Since my great-grandfather died, weird stuff has happened.  I had a dream two nights ago that I was going to grandma and grandpa's house, and I was upset because he wasn't going to be there.  I thought it would be weird and sad.  Then I started walking down the path, and over their yard, in the woods, everywhere were pumpkins.  Pumpkins are the thing I identify with grandpa, ever since I was little and I would go to his barn to pick out my halloween pumpkin.

I told my grandma Z (great-grandpa was her dad), and she said that all the kids had been taking turns staying down at the house with grandma since grandpa had died.  Grandma Z said it felt like grandpa was there, and that every night since grandpa died, when grandma Louden gets into bed, grandpa's side is warm.

Then she told me that grandma had gone to the basement, where grandpa's den with his pool table is, and that grandpa was down there walking around and just doing his thing.  I could be skeptical about this, because she's grieving, but my uncle Ed, who has openly denounced the idea of anything paranormal, walked into the living room the other morning and saw grandpa sitting in his chair.  Word is, he turned, smiled at Ed, and faced back toward the tv.

This kind of explains why Christian didn't want to go into their house the night of grandpa's visitation.

There's always a night in the fall when you realize that night has gone from happy and fun and full of possibilities to sinister and scary.  Summer nights are invigorating, winter nights are frightening.  The click over happens in the inbetween seasons.

Some people will say that it's because the Seelie Court holds sway during the summer months and the Unseelie Court gets to rule during the winter.  I've heard a few Wiccans spout off that the fae keep the same calendar as they do, but I can't get on board with that.  I don't think faeries actually care about time.

Maybe it's just the nature of man, that we find pleasure in the warm, sunny weather of summer and we can feel the fall coming on.

Either way, the magic night was last night.  For the first time since April, I felt anxious and ready to get into the safety of my home when I was outside after dark.  It will be that way every night now, until next year.

In other news, I haven't been making frequent posts here because I haven't had my head tuned into my intuition for a while.  If that makes sense, good, if it doesn't, it wasn't meant to.