Before I drive south to Rochester this morning, I made sure to walk.  Staying active is part of my mental health plan.

 

The reason?

 

Nightmares.

 

I have had three in the last three weeks. This is significant, because I have had (maybe) half a dozen in my entire life (of 74 years) before now.

 

This morning before I woke up, I had a nightmare that military bombers were assembling in the sky not far from where I was standing. I wanted to warn my family — which was in the same vicinity but lower down a hill from me — to get out of the field that these planes were flying over, but I had no way to reach them.  They were too far away to call out to them, and I didn’t have a phone on me.  I felt powerless and afraid for them.  But I knew they were witnessing the same military assemblage in the sky. Alas! They were our own planes, so they probably weren’t even mildly concerned.

 

I was!

 

Suddenly, strategically targeted bombs started coming out of the planes and landing in the fields below me, which is where my family was.  Horrified, I saw lots of people scrambling up the hill toward me, but I didn’t recognize any of them.

 

Needless to say, I woke up with my chest pounding.

 

Usually in the past, whenever I’d have a bad dream, I would stay with it and “make it better” by its end. I believe that’s called lucid dreaming, where you’re aware you’re dreaming and can control the trajectory and outcomes.

 

Always in the past with nightmares (going off a cliff in a car, outrunning falling trees in a windstorm, helping hurt people, etc.) , I have always been able to do orchestrate a survivable outcome, a happy ending.

 

Recently, I haven’t.

 

So, I’m staying active. I realize I’ve done all I can possible do to report what (and who’s) on the menu for the U.S. under this regime, and that it is falling on deaf ears.  I guess that’s why these nightmares are happening.

 

None of them have been move related. They’ve all been HERE related.

 

I’ve stopped marinating in the latest political shenanigans.  I’ve unsubscribed from the vast majority of my usual news sources. (I’m keeping Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich and Meidas Touch News.) I’m doing my darndest to divest from U.S.-based troubling thoughts and errant hopes.  (But hell, nearly the entire global population is feeling the same sense of dread, more or less, and for the same reason!  What a fucking sad state of affairs!!!)

 

It’s going to be what it is.   

 

I’ll still vote (if that’s still allowed by the criminal enterprises now in power in this nation, who want to eliminate mail in ballots, but Congress is the only entity that can change the status quo, and the Senate won’t allow the elimination of mail in ballots) and I’ll still keep an occasional eye on things, mostly via Tico Times in Costa Rica.

 

But when I get down there, I hope to hear/to follow so little of this current crap that it all fades into something along the lines of a poorly-remembered nightmare, as it did after Biden gained the presidency (via a well documented, aboveboard election!) and the ship of state started to return to its original course — which wasn’t great (too many marginalized folks still, too few corporate DEMS willing to fight tooth and nail for their wellbeing, too) but at least it wasn’t this:

 

a place where nightmares have no happy ending.

 

 

Update: Made it down to and back from Rochester unscathed.  All crucial docs are signed and copies made for whoever needs to keep them on file.

 

Said goodbye to my older sister for probably the last time.

*sigh*

Took a picture of us together after about a one-mile walk in the woods:

 

 

Total steps taken today (so far): 9458.  Took 10K total steps yesterday!