Waking and Sleeping, the last 24

The Sleeping Life:

Last night, sometime between 1am and 7am, I had a very vivid dream. It was long but I only remember one moment. I was sitting in my Grandma's living room (a scene from childhood). Quite a few people were there - liesurely sitting in a circle-ish formaton and wearing bold colors - but I can't be sure of anyone's presence except my Grandma and either my aunt or my mom. It suddenly struck me, while I sat there, that this was a dream. [Now I have to tell you that recently, Curt, Drew, and I spoke for a moment about WHERE memories are. Where are they stored.. just in our heads? Am I really carrying around whole worlds - years worth of real life moments - just within the confines of my skull? We've also talked about how some memories are stored in organs such as the liver, and Amanda told us that some people who have had liver transplants have inherited the donor's memories. So that's the basis for the next development.] I was shocked that I was in such a vivid world and yet knew it was a dream. And I said to myself, where IS this world? I couldn't figure out where this dream dimension exists. It was one of those dream-awareness moments where you want to hang on and explore, but it had the added question of identifying where - in what dimension - I was at that moment. Usually we're satisfied to understand a dream just by saying it was a dream, but it was too vivid and big - where does it exist? For some reason, I'm surprised I couldn't understand it anymore being inside the dream than I can right now being outside the dream. You'd think that since I was momentarily there, I would have been able to do the research and find out.

The Waking Life:

I was stopped at a red light today, heading home around noon. I was in the left lane, pretty close to the grassy median. My head was propped up on my arm which was propped up on my door, and I was lost in thoughts and the music on the radio. For no particular reason, my head sort of rolled to the left and flopped over, my eyes slowly following this path. Shock: just a few feet away, a dead deer laid with its body half on the road and half on the grass. Its death was clearly recent, as it was very plump and totally unbothered by bugs. (In fact, I didn't see any blood.) It was laying on its side (as gravity would have it), but its head was in a position you might expect for a creature on its back. The deer's eyes were big and brown and wide-open. It's funny that it looked more fake to me than real - like a mounted deer head you might see in a tacky bar rather than a beautiful creature on the side of the road in North Carolina. I kept looking at it and trying to tell myself it was real. I guess, though, there isn't a tremendously big difference between a dead deer on the road and a dead deer on a wall.

Well, the eyes are different (now that I think about it). And those eyes are what kept me so transfixed.

I involuntarily moaned and kept looking at it until the light turned green. Death is something else...