Some dreams; and Sunrise, sunset

Let's see: I had a dream last night that featured the Geico Cavemen, or maybe the variants from the Cavemen TV series. It was apparently part of a Perry Mason-style lawyer show, where one of the Cavemen was on trial for something, and the other two Cavemen, one of them himself a lawyer (though not Phil Hartman's Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer), were among the spectators. At the climax of the story the two of them rose out of their church pew-style seats to interrupt the trial, at which point everyone else in the courtroom was shocked to discover that there had been two other Cavemen in the courtroom in addition to the defendant. They then proceeded to do a series of poses for a model shoot, and their clothing - both had been well-dressed, and the lawyer Caveman had been dressed appropriately for a lawyer in a courtroom - was transformed to gray bodysuits with black squiggly designs on them. This may or may not have been influenced by me seeing a few minutes of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes before I went to bed.

Which reminds me of a dream I had several weeks ago that has somehow managed to not get washed away just yet. This was a dream about vampires - not a frequent dream topic for me. In it, vampires were something like the Mafia: everybody knew they existed, everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who knew one, but nobody wanted to acknowledge their existence lest they attract unwanted attention. So everybody just looked the other way while the vampires preyed on the edges of society. Most of the vampires in the dream had a thuggish, ganster-ish appearance about them, and were generally pretty scuzzy - unwashed hair, stubbly whiskers, their clothing occasionally looking a little shabby. One part of the dream that stands out was a vampire larder - a room where badly-beaten, half-dead humans were kept, to be pulled out whenever the vampires felt a bit peckish. And there wasn't a sense that these vampires were simply sucking blood; they were pretty much just tearing living people apart and eating them. Fun stuff.

Okay. Enough. As a reward for getting through all that, why not enjoy some photos?

Here is the sky shortly before sunrise on Tuesday. In this first photo, the sky has that glowing-ember quality it sometimes gets when the clouds are just right.

The sky started to lighten pretty quickly, the deep red-orange lightening to an orange-yellow.

One effect I especially liked - and I'm glad my camera was able to see it, too - was the gray/pink mottling throughout the sky. The ornamental weather vane on the peak of my neighbor's roof gives you a good idea of what part of the sky I'm looking at compared to the other photos.

So that was Tuesday morning. On Sunday evening I was over at my house across town shortly before sunset, and I got this image of the steeple of St. Mary's church rising above the rooftops of the neighborhood.

There's something very poignant about this view of the old church with its forward-bent cross on top, situated at the highest point in the city.* This is my church; my family has always belonged to this Parish. But like so many other Parishes in Northeastern Pennsylvania it is in constant danger of closing. This is partly due to a shortage of new priests, partly due to a contraction in the number of parishioners in local Parishes, but mostly due to a massive reallocation of Diocesan resources to the parts of the Diocese that have seen a population explosion thanks to the post-9/11 relocation of thousands and thousands of New Yorkers to the border regions in the Poconos, some of which are technically still part of the Scranton Diocese. Capturing this as the setting sun casts shadows of houses upon other houses and lights up one face of the steeple as the others remain in relative darkness just adds to the poignancy.

Also, that cloud is pretty cool.


*I think this is the highest point. There may actually be a point a few blocks away that is technically higher.