Liz Baumann

Dream I had last night:

I was skiing, someplace I’d been snowboarding before. My sunglasses wanted to fall off and without them I couldn’t really read the signs, but then decided I didn’t want to bother with them anyway. I ended up somewhere familiar, but then I found out the run turned into a whole bunch of jumps. At first I was trying to back up and let others go ahead of me, thinking I would go walk back to another run. It was difficult backing up though and I decided instead to just give it a go. I went, and the first jump wasn’t too high, but then I landed and the surface was ripply. I did not fall though. There wasn’t a lot of snow but the plastic or whatever beneath the snow was fine to ski on. There were more jumps ahead and I had a choice to veer right for different kinds of jumps, ones I’d done before while snowboarding. I was heading there but then decided to go back left to where I hadn’t been before. The next jumps on the left were even bigger than the first one, the first of these was really tall. But I managed it. I wondered how, why wasn’t I falling?

Side note: I haven’t downhill skied in years, preferring snowboarding now, and I never did any jumps on skis. Last winter I snowboarded a dozen or so times and started teaching myself jumps. I haven’t been to the mountains yet this winter.

Is there such a thing as a “wrong turn”? Some believe there is no right or wrong. If everything happens according to fate, it would seem right and wrong don’t really apply. Free will? Well, I guess then the answer could depend on perspective. I personally feel there is at least some fate at play, in my mind at least I feel I have evidence supporting it, although I sometimes have been inclined to pretend it doesn’t exist. As for free will I’m undecided, but intrigued.

If there is such a thing as a wrong turn, I wonder if I made it when someone dangled a carrot in my face and I chose the stick instead. This was not long after I made a comment about wanting “more carrot, less stick”. I have noticed before that things seem to happen according to what has been said. Maybe I disobeyed this principle, making a wrong turn.

Can I right the wrong? I think I’ve been given enough signs in the last few weeks to suggest that I am going that way. Dreams, where a portion of it comes true within a few days later… three of those. Synchronicities that have meaning to me personally. I say trivial peculiar things and then see them manifest in metaphorical or symbolic ways. I speak of things I’ve realized about myself and then stumble upon them elsewhere. Feelings of intuition that are followed by observation.

Quite a few people have noticed the gray cloud hanging over my head since Thanksgiving and I’ve appreciated the support and advice they have given. I’ve taken some of it. Some of it just doesn’t fit me, and I’ve realized the importance of recognizing this. While I’m mostly out of my funke now, I’m still feeling rather shy and self-doubtful… in part because my shadow has caught up to me, bringing to the surface some aspects of my personality that have been dormant for the past year or so. How my shadow’s return is related to all of this I haven’t yet figured out.

In times like these I suppose some might suggest I look to my inner compass. But when the poles keep moving around, it is probably the worst advice to take to whether this storm. A weather vain is of more use here. Because also, I have consistently found that many of the best, most meaningful times of my life have happened when I’ve stopped trying to control things and just ride like the Wind.

ashes to ashes

Last night on the Forbidden Planet: complete blur.

The 80/20 rule was followed
The 20 as acquaintances came first
Interesting
Still so many I did not see
I saw life passing me by once again when I said ‘hi’ to 5th Element
I said I was one of her 4
But I really rather like the idea of being the 6th
Randomness invited me over to the Otherside
I did not get a chance to find out Weather I could see my reflection in the Mirrorman
I got caught in a Bizarre Liz Triangle!!
I was happy to see the Southern Sun again
And, too, the woman who started it all
Or at least started my absurd relationship with the Whether
Pennycat told me that maybe my idea is not too crazy after all
I had too much to drink
There was a bunch of ice
And we all agreed that time passed too quickly
But it’s quality, not quantity
For me, at least.
Or I should remember that.

Not nearly enough pictures: Flickr

I was at this party in a series of parking lots. There was a white figure that produced green fire from its hands. I met a cheshire cat and a woman with flashing LED antennas made of organ wire. A bunch of people flitted about with wings. Someone was wearing their heart on their back, it was blue and pulsing. I was hypnotized by a green, blue and white ring. A yellow submarine kept running around on the ground.

The music was good and for a while all I wanted to do was dance on a lighted box. So I did, but my fur kept falling down and I was nearly tripping on it. Everyone else was busy watching fireflies and dancing flames.

In another tent I met a beautiful woman who had the voice of a man; she had a lucky charm with her which talked with me for a spell. A little while later there was a lighted flower whose petals flashed with color. A crowd had gathered to worship it and the music was beating in time to its petals.

I went outside again and someone was playing with a bright and colorful yo-yo made from two martini glasses stuck together. There was an orb within a rigid geometric structure that had landed in the parking lot, it was flashing red, green and blue.

Later on, just before I woke up, I walked back into the flower tent and went downstairs to have a conversation with a rainbow man about pick-up lines. Then I tried to make friends with a dog but it snarled at me.

Wow, that was some dream.

More photos on flickr

Four years ago I had a dream which I only vaguely remember now, but I wrote it down in a dream diary. The next entry in this diary is on 3/5/11, and I started keeping the diary in 1994. Yesterday I was looking up another more recent dream and stumbled on this one again. I thought about my experiences over the past year and it made me see this dream in a completely new light.

In January of this year (2011) I first started working with LEDs and other electronics. December 2010 was when I first got the idea to do this; before then it was nowhere present in my consciousness. I frequently have problems with my LEDs flickering and/or not working and it is extremely frustrating because I haven’t had much success in figuring out what is wrong; I replace lights and wires and they still won’t cooperate. I also broke someone else’s lights recently, and I want to remedy that.

Here is my dream from 9/27/07:

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“My lights don’t work!”
I woke up trying to say this loudly. My dream had ended with me turning on lights in my bedroom (different layout but with some lights like in the guest bedroom). The lights wouldn’t light up, and I felt it was due to the bulbs (obvious) yet at the same time, felt frustrated that I was always changing the bulbs, yet the lights were always burning out the bulbs quickly. When I tried to speak the words in the dream, my voice didn’t want to work either, which is why in life I spoke it loudly and forced.

Also in the dream, before turning on lights I was trying to hit the wall for some reason, and my impacts seemed unfocused and I could barely feel it and I figured the wall could barely feel it. And before that, I was with some others, it was kind of half first-person and half third person, but I was wanting to listen to some certain music (Heart, CCR?) and my partner/boyfriend/husband wanted to listen to something else, and there were others there too. This half-self sort of pissed off the others; another different first person of me saw this and wondered, possibly out loud, why I/she didn’t listen on headphones and take a break from the situation (and him too) and not only would we both get to listen to what we wanted but also would have the benefit of a break.

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Some notes I made at the time after thinking about this dream:
The earlier part (about the lights) I woke with the feeling of being numb, fading. Wonder if it has to do with (if dreams have meaning) my wanting to not be in people’s way, or just a feeling of fadedness or lack of interest or something. Yesterday I almost caused a head-on collision at a confusing intersection while driving.

In my last post I promised to spill why my burner name is “Sparks”. There are a bunch of reasons:

• This spring I had a dream I was camping alone and was able to light a fire but then had no fuel to put on it*
• One day a couple months ago my friend Malina, in complete seriousness, asked me if I had her spark. (She wanted to do an Ignite Boulder presentation and they call the topic summary a “spark”; she couldn’t find her copy from before. I of course knew I would have it, and I did.)
• I’ve found 2 lighters since June (fuel)
• My obsession with sparkler painting this July 4 (one of those lighters came at exactly the right time for that)
• My interest in lighting up clothes, bikes etc.
• I have a sneaking suspicion I’ve sparked at least one relationship between other people
• I need to be careful around people who are dynamite with a short fuse
• Various people using the word spark around me and/or saying I sparked some thought for them
• Let’s just say, it takes one to know one
• more that I won’t say, have forgotten, or haven’t learned yet… it seems almost daily the word surfaces or there’s a metaphor or song or some other new reason

Does that spark anything for you?

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*The dream mentioned above was interesting in its own right so I’ll tell the whole story:
I had a dream I was camping alone and was able to light a fire but then realized I had no fuel to put on it, leaving me to helplessly watch it smolder. Then I realized that I should have put up my tent beforehand; now it was dark, cold and starting to rain. I got the tent up only to find I was camping somewhere off-limits and had to move. Now I was at my wits end, feeling very hopeless… but then there was a voice (my power animal?) pointing out that I had a car which I could put my things in and which would provide temporary shelter, and that was enough comfort to make me go on.

Post-dream analysis:
In waking life I was feeling pretty inadequate about something so the dream fit there and really made an impression. After I thought about it for a few days I felt the part about my car was telling me to spend time in Denver not just Boulder. At Apogaea this summer we started setting up camp and then were told we couldn’t camp on that spot and had to move.