Dreams

Sometimes I have the strangest dreams. I dream every night and I remember almost 100% of my dreams, at least when I first wake up. After the first few moments they usually fade away. However, there are some dreams that stick in my mind 'forever'.

One of those dreams happened when I lived in Alaska. It was summer and 24 hour daylight. In winter I loved going out and watching the northern lights dance and play across the sky whenever they happened to be out. Well, seeing as how it was summer and 24 hour daylight - there were no northern lights to be seen. Just blue sky, or cloudy sky as the case may be. That one summer night I dreamed a very, very vivid dream.

I dreamed the aurora was out and I was watching it and loving it and enjoying it and being totally amazed by it. When I woke up I was totally amazed as well. Why? Because this is what I dreamed the aurora was: I laughed so hard. I remember trying to describe it to Mel. My dream could have come straight out of the movie, Fantasia. A chorus line of little pink dancing pigs, lined up across a dark night sky, stars twinkling behind them, their little legs and feet pumping up and down as they danced in unison, arms across each other's backs. It still makes me smile. I've actually had the dream a couple times since then!

Why did I dream such a thing? !!! I do NOT think of the aurora normally as a chorus line of dancing pink pigs. :)

Last night I dreamed I saw the noctilucent clouds for the first time. My dreams are always long and convoluted, that's for sure, but somewhere toward the end of this dream I went outside, looked up and saw the clouds in the sky. They started as a little white 'puff' of cloud in a night sky that grew into a whirling, dancing cloud of light which covered a large portion of the sky.

Now I have a fairly good idea as to why I dreamed this particular part of the dream (the rest of the dream - I have no idea why that all happened) - I really, really want to see the noctilucent clouds AND over the past 36 hours we have been in a solar storm which produced aurora sightings in area where it actually gets dark this time of year. The photo in the following article is very much like what I dreamed, only these aurora have much more color.

AURORA SURPRISE: Sometimes the auroras are so bright, you just can't sleep. "I was up all night on July 21st, but it was totally worth it!" says photographer Zoltan Kenwell of Chip Lake, Alberta. This is what kept him awake:
"It was a very impressive show that lasted 4.5 hours!" says Kenwell.

Forecasters did not predict this display. It began on when a seemingly minor solar wind stream hit Earth's magnetic field. The minor hit turned into a not-so-minor display because a crack opened in Earth's magnetic field, allowing solar wind to pour in and fuel the storm. Northern Lights descended as far south as the Dakotas, Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin. The solar wind is still blowing, but the crack has closed, bringing an end to the lights. article in spaceweather.com

I love my dreams!!

(Above graph found at: 3-day Estimated Planetary Kp-Index Monitor)