It seems that my sociological postings are not overly stimulating to my few readers. Well, perhaps this topic will garner a few comments....

A recurring nightmare I have had most of my life, consists of 3-4 variations on the theme of being alone. In the most common and most painful of these nightmares I will sit and watch as one by one all the people I know and care about die. The death continues until I am utterly alone, with no one left to be with me. A variant on that type of nightmare, I find myself in a nebulous space with no tangible objects in any direction. It is as if I am in a horrible void with nothing to sense, nor anything to do, and the isolation is unbearable. A third variation of this same morbid theme is where I find I must run to some distant, nebulous place to get something to save a friend or member of my family. In the panic to get to the destination I lose any ability to see or sense anyone around me and feel lost.

While these brief synopses are able to give you a picture of my fears, I must also state that in my waking hours, I also can easily slip into a mindset where I focus on the horrid truths of our life. For example, for much of our lives, we grow and develop and learn how to love and accept love from those we know and care about, but the later parts of our lives are spent learning how to cope with those beautiful connections and that caring and love being harshly severed as those we love die.

It is hard to stay away from that harsh reality, but I try during my life to focus on the positive, but the reality of the deaths of those we care about sometimes makes my soul feel wilted and incapable of caring.