This is why i scrapbook

I have been reading a blog by a girl named Shimelle, for quite awhile now. She posted this project a couple weeks ago, and all you had to do was either make a video, or a scrapbook page, or a mini album, or just write a paragraph about why you scrapbook. So i decided to make a mini album about why i scrapbook. Here is the finished project:

15 interesting facts about Dreams

I found this on someone's tumblr account which you can find here. And if you haven't heard of tumblr before, man are you missing out, it is the next best thing to scrapbooking, and you have to check it out! Anyway, i thought this was very interesting:

1. You forget 90% of your dreams.Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream is forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone.

2. Blind people also dream. People who became blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion.

3. Everybody dreams. Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder). If you think, you are not dreaming, you just forget your dreams.

4. In our dreams, we only see faces that we already know. Our mind is not inventing faces – in our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

5. Not everybody dreams in color. A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. Studies from 1915 through to the 1950s maintained that the majority of dreams were in black and white, but these results began to change in the 1960s. Today, only 4.4% of the dreams of under-25 year-olds are in black and white. Recent research has suggested that those changing results may be linked to the switch from black-and-white film and TV to color media.

6. Dreams are symbolic. If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language.  Whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself.

7. Emotions; The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Negative emotions are more common than positive ones.

8. You can have four to seven dreams in one night. On average, you can dream anywhere from one or two hours every night.

9. Animals dream too. Studies have been done on many different animals, and they all show the same brain waves during dreaming sleep as humans. Watch a dog sleeping sometime. The paws move like they are running and they make yipping sounds as if they are chasing something in a dream.

10. Body Paralysis.

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes. REM sleep in adult humans typically occupies 20-25% of total sleep, about 90-120 minutes of a night’s sleep.

During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain in order to prevent the movements which occur in the dream from causing the physical body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the brain awakens.

11. Dream Incorporation. Our mind interprets the external stimuli that our senses are bombarded with when we are asleep and make them a part of our dreams. This means that sometimes, in our dreams, we hear a sound from reality and incorporate it in a way. For example you may be dreaming that you are in a concert, while your brother is playing a guitar during your sleep.

12. Men and women dream differently. Men tend to dream more about other men. Around 70% of the characters in a man’s dream are other men. On the other hand, a woman’s dream contains almost an equal number of men and women. Aside from that, men generally have more aggressive emotions in their dreams than the female lot.

13. Precognitive Dreams. Results of several surveys across large population sets indicate that between 18% and 38% of people have experienced at least one precognitive dream and 70% have experienced déjà vu. The percentage of persons that believe precognitive dreaming is possible is even higher, ranging from 63% to 98%.

14. If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming.

15. You can experience an orgasm in your dreams. You can not only have s e x as pleasurable as in your real life while dreaming, but also experience an  o r g a s m  as strong as a real one, without any wet results. The sensations felt while lucid dreaming (touch, pleasure and etc..) can be as pleasurable and strong (or I believe even stronger) as the sensations experienced in the real world.

Thanks for looking!

new blog

Okay, i've decided to make a separate blog for project life, and you can find it here.

I will officially start on February 1st, which also happens to be the first day of my new semester! and i think i will just focus on doing a weekly post, to keep the amount of pages down.

Tell me what you think!!

thinking

I really want to do project life, and it just so happens that Becky Higgin's is launching the digital version of the project today, so if you want the details when she posts them go over to her blog.

I am really struggling with how to do the project though. Ali Edwards posted her version on her blog today, and i love the way it looks in the paper version. I think a digital version would work best  for me but Becky Higgin's version is too expensive, it will cost up-words of $100 to actually print the book, which i cannot afford. 

Which brings me to my next point, i think i will just blog my year, either on this blog or another one, and keep a daily journal, both visual and writing. And after the year is up i will print my blog using blurb which will only cost me about $30-40 instead of $100. Much more affordable in my opinion. And to keep it on the cheaper side i think i will do a post a week with a weeks worth of journaling and pictures so it will have around 52 pages in it. 

Some of the downsides of doing the project digitally is you cannot put memorabilia in the book, unless it is scanned in. which is something i will not do, i already know that. So to solve that problem i will just collect it in an envelope, and keep it with my printed book when it's finished. Another thing is all my writing will be typed, and you cannot put your own writing unless you scan it in as well, but i am okay with that because i include my writing on all of my pages, and my own personal journal.

I just thought i would share what i was thinking..... are you doing project life? or are you trying Project 365?? how are you going to do your album??

project life

okay so i am a 365 dropout, twice, i know it's horrible. but the truth is it was too much stress to manage it, and print the photos and journaling etc. etc. and i didn't buy a kit from becky higgins so it wasn't that big of a deal.

But i am going to finish this project, i will i promise. it's just a matter of when!

Becky Higgins just came out with a new kit, called project life, that doesn't necessarily involve taking a photo a day, it's a little bit simpler then that, heres what she posted on her blog:

"PROJECT LIFE is the perfect solution for preserving your pictures and anecdotes and stories without all the time & money that traditional scrapbooking requires. PROJECT LIFE is for those who can keep up with taking a picture every day (I personally love this way of recording my family's life) ... and ... it's perfect for those who say that's just too much. It's just too hard to keep up with that pace. There is total & complete flexibility with PROJECT LIFE. "

Things to include include instead of a picture:

• Artwork, sketches, handwriting, etc.
• Quotes. Did someone say something funny or quirky or profound or memorable or interesting today? Quote them.
• Receipts
• Movie ticket stubs
• Take-out menu
• Print out an e-mail or part of a website you were browsing
• Piece of mail
• Note from school
• Newspaper clipping
• Thank-you note or birthday card you received
• Recipe (a new one you tried or an old favorite you just made again)
• Handwritten note from one of the kids or your spouse
• "Thought" of the day or a favorite scripture or quote
• Lists (to-do, groceries, errands, bills paid)
• Packaging from food items, etc.
• IDEAS FOR DOING A SPECIFIC ALBUM OR TO INCLUDE IN YOUR PROJECT:
• All About Me. Whether you are an adult or a child or teenager, you focus completely on what makes up your life (what you wear, what you eat, what you love, where you go, who you hang out with, where you work, why you do what you do) OR All-time Favorite Photos. Pack the album full of your favorite pictures, whether they're ones passed down to you from your grandparents or the snapshot you just took this week.

i am liking this alot, and she actually just posted on her blog that they will be releasing a digital kit as well, that you can use free of charge. At the end of the project though you can have the chance to buy it as a photobook if you choose, which is what i plan to do, when i get through this! My start date is going to be February 1 so wish me luck!

happy

I know it has been a very long time since i have posted anything! and i really do feel bad about that, but i am going to make mush more of an effort to post more this year. 

Right now i am sitting in our new scraproom and my mom's house, we repainted and moved all the furniture around after my older sister moved in with my dad. I am loving how it is turning out, and i am so excited to start working in it. I have been organizing like crazy these past couple days and throwing alot of stuff out that i know i will never use, and it feels good to get all that clutter out of my life!

I will post pictures as soon as it is all finished!

But back to right now, i am about to finish a book, sweethearts by Sara Zarr which is very, very good. i would recommend reading it, and it will be a quick read too i promise, i could barley put it down when i started reading 2 nights ago. 

I am sitting here with my book, and a cup of coffee, listening to james morrison, matt nathanson and ingrid michaelson and i could not be happier! 

Have a great weekend!

heres and inspiring picture for you too: