Mindfulness

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Sorry about the blurred photograph but I had several tries and this was the best.   Many, many years ago, during my first marriage (my husband died in 1991) - also a very happy one - my husband always used to joke that I had a 'butterfly mind'.   He was quite right - I do find it difficult to keep my mind on the same subject for long.   One morning when he brought me my early morning cup of tea he put this in my hand.   He had seen it in a Jewellers somewhere and bought it because it reminded him of me.

Often I have difficulty getting off to sleep - mainly because my mind is too active.   I intend to access infinitywellnessproject.co.uk and take their Programme to see if that helps.   I have been  trying on the advice of my Physiotherapist to do breathing exercises when I go to bed.   Keep my mind just on breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth twenty times - if my mind wanders 'pull it back'.   So far I can only manage five breaths without having to do that.  Hopefully this will improve if I keep it up.

I do also have incredibly vivid dreams most nights - not nightmares - often very amusing or very pleasant dreams of walking in the country - rarely if ever anything unpleasant.   Last night/ this morning was a case in point and  is what prompted today's post.   When I was growing up in Lincolnshire there used to be Lincoln's April Fair which was held on the South Common every year.  It lasted several days and everybody went - it had all kinds of things (many would not be countenanced today, quite rightly) - lions, elephants (they used to parade through town the day before the Fair opened - my grandfather once came home and said to my grandmother 'there's elephants in town' and when she asked him how he knew he said 'I've seen their droppings'), clowns, fairground rides - swing boats, cockerels and horses and such like, and awful sideshows mainly of deformed people,  roll the penny games - many many more.   You could hear the noise and the music from far away.

The reason I tell you this is because last night I dreamt of the April Fair, of going round it, of riding on the rides, of watching the lions , of buying a stick of rock and walking round eating it.
Then - later in the night, just before I got up in fact - I dreamt I got onto a bus and everyone but me on the bus was from the fair.   There was a man in a black and white costume with half his face painted white and the other half black, there was a clown with a red ball for a nose,  there was the lion tamer with his whip.   They were all there.   I got on the bus and sat down.   Nobody spoke, nobody moved, all were like statues.   Then I awoke.

I can't help wondering what an interpreter of dreams would make of it all!