It’s raining in Tennessee. The lightning woke me around 6 am and I think that’s pretty crazy. In Seattle we almost never have thunderstorms. When we do they are usually in the evening. I’ve lived other places, like Denver, where certain times of year there’s daily thunderstorms which you can almost set your watch by the times they roll in and roll out again. Here, though, there are storms all the time. Not so much in the dead of winter, but indiscriminately the rest of the year and at times that I find odd (like early in the morning). But as unusual as I still find the strangely timed storms, I never get sick of them. Much like the sound of the trains, they are tied to happiness for me. Even if it’s a brief, fleeting, 6 am wave of happiness before I fall back asleep to the sound of the rumbling thunder (which at first I thought was REALLY LOUD garbage trucks, heh).

I had such strange dreams last night. Mostly about people I haven’t seen in years or people I haven’t yet met. In them I shopped in stores that don’t exist, built clocks with small doll house rooms full of miniature furniture in front of the clock faces. I lectured my sister about packing too much to take to Spain, I made up a spare bed for my mom in house I’ve never lived in. I walked through giant forests, and then against the flow of parade traffic, celebrating a revolution in city I’ve never been to, holding hands with a man I’ve only seen in my dreams. I slept WAY too much last night and it was almost like dreams with out stories at all, just pieces, snapshots, of the past and the possible futures. I wish I could remember more than flashes of them, more than just the emotional feeling of them. I want enough to tell the actual stories in them, to make up stories for characters who appear in them.