I dream of spaces and places that are made of glinting light, emotional glinting.  Light makes a space and a place, and whether it is bright and cheery, or full of fear, or filled with a thousand other emotions in those spaces and places of my dreams, it is the light that makes them emotional. The light makes fear of height in my dream.  For the cliff lives mightily high and the overlook scary, only when the glinting light forms its shadows and views.  Or the sun, the afternoon sun, paints long shadows over a plain, the foothills of my dream.

The sunlight and the daylight of Utah is always lucent.  But the light of Oregon, that glimmers crepuscular all day long.  My ancestors left the dark and dreary light of England and Sweden with bright-light hope for Utah.  Then it was not Utah, the territory was named Deseret, ignorantly hateful of the Native Americans, the Utes and the Paiutes and the many other tribes that traversed the light-filled, high-mountain valleys there.  I think that light that shines so bright in that territory energized the souls of my ancestors.  The Native Americans already knew that, felt it, and wove it into their dreams forever and still do.  I think it energized my ancestors more than the Light hope from their prophet’s sermons. Perhaps.  

I hate fluorescent light. It drains my energy, opposite of the sun.  Where will I go for light now?  New Zealand summer beckons me.  How will the sunlight appear there?  Will the shadows be reversed like the spinning water drains, so they say?  

Some dreams are soft, blue Christmas light that enliven my memory of mom’s comforting words, confident, mysterious light.  Now I am old, I dream and day-dream a lot, and like light at night, I sometimes cannot see the differences behind the lights.  That afternoon-sun dream, the penumbra, foothill plain, smaller version of the Great Plains.  That dream was emotion.  The Ruby Mountains, in that dream, were the creators of the penumbra, the aura, and the emotion that came with it.  As that dream progressed in time, the shadows extended longer and longer over the slightly rising plains.  Fear came into the dream, mysterious fear.  The plains of the Ruby Mountains were ruined by a developer, and I fear developers who “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”  It was called Spring Creek, with trails to trailers, one-acre parcels, dotting, spotting, ruining the plains.  Plans and plains, they do not mix.  One trailer is lit from inside, home-sweet-home lights, incandescent bulb light, yellow and warm.  And I am transported inside that one to an even warmer fire in the fireplace of the 1970’s, the red Malm woodstove, of Danish modern design, popular to even the trailer dwellers in Nevada, now dated into discomforting ugliness like shag carpets. It will rise again, a la mode, no doubt, like everything does.  The fireplace is a cylinder that smiles, and the smiling family inside the trailer, happy and caring, change the dream from mystery and fear to joy and love.  Firelight and cozy-light and bright euphoria light.  I recognize that family, a young couple called to be my Blazer leaders in the Primary.  Blazers, blazing ironic light.

Like my life, my dreams reflect that my mood is intimately connected with light. Seasonal-effective, affecting me, disorderly.  Sad. That sounds like a Trump tweet ending, no?  I cannot end like that.  No, I will not be sad.  Light will change; spring will come.  Realized is what I am.  I am a life well-realized, now well-examined.  Now I know and I can be delightful.