Dream a Little Dream

September 28, 2001 - One of the greatest things about dreaming is that almost anything can happen in the process. A regular person can fly, soaring above the ground, making the sky their home. And there’s nothing like having that dream invade reality as it did with Joan Griffith.

"I thought that I was dreaming," she said upon the completion of her ActiveHome setup. "There I was in my living room and the lights turned on as I entered the room. It was like an invisible angel was reading my mind and taking care of all of my needs."

Joan has recently retired, and her and her husband decided to make some improvements on the house. One of those improvements was ActiveHome. "After all," Joan says, "I’m not as mobile as I used to be." While she may have aches and pains in her body, ’her mind is still sharp as a tack’ as they say, and she had no problem setting up her system. Even though by her own admission she wasn’t a "technical person."

"The first thing we had to fix were the lights," Joan said. "Nothing was more frustrating for me than to get all the way upstairs and ready for bed only to remember that I forgot to turn off the living room lights." That means another trip down the stairs, which, as a body gets older, becomes a little more of a hassle. To solve this problem they installed motion sensors to all the lights. That way the lights came on automatically when they entered the room, and turned themselves off after they left the room. But just in case they want a little more control, there’s always the remote control.

"I really love it that I don’t have to wander around the house looking for lights that haven’t been turned off. " She says when she used to go on her "light checking" expeditions, "it looked more like I was wandering around aimlessly." And as she says, "when I do that, it scares my husband," and it was starting to worry her children and grandchildren too she says in fun.

Thanks to the motion sensors, little things like lights are taken care of. And if she does need to make any arrangement, then there is the remote control. "That thing amazes me," she says. "No matter where I am in the house that thing works. When I’m upstairs, I can still turn off the lights down in the den in the basement." Boy is that convenient, and it saves miles of stair stepping. (She knows this because she sent her husband down many times to verify her pronouncement.)

"I thought it was a miracle" she says, "until I awoke and realized that it was all a dream. Or was it? Get ActiveHome and find out for yourself."

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Thanks Joan.

Send comments or feedback on this article to xzone@x10.com