Dreams can be silly things, and as much as our own dreams may fascinate us, they often come across as tedious to others.
Rarely do I dare to share mine.
But in the past few weeks, I've been enjoying some fantastically vivid and thought-provoking dreams, and in the interest of preserving them for my own enjoyment, I share them here.
And if you don't want to read them, I understand. Feel free to scroll on.
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Layers
Five years have passed since my mom died, and I've finally found the keys to her home.
In real life, my mom did indeed move out our of my childhood home about ten years before she died, to a calm and cultivated condo in town.
But in the dream, I realize that I have been fooled by this decoy home.
I am discovering that she'd actually moved just a few houses down from our old lake house, and as I push open the front door, I'm shocked to find that this place is a proper rabbit's warren. Jumbled rooms sprawl this way and that; small flights of stairs lead to a dozen different levels; one room spills into another and much to my surprise and horror, every inch of every surface in sight is covered with stuff.
At first, I think all the stuff is garbage - old magazines, empty boxes, wire hangers from the dry cleaners, that sort of thing - but as I poke around and begin to sort things out, I find some surprises. On a cluttered table near her front door, buried under a heap of junk mail, I pull out two vintage hardcover books in sweet shades of faded blue; I prop them against an old artichoke finial, and stand back to survey them, astounded at their beauty. All around me, I realize that there are countless lovely objects, obviously collected with great care and eye for detail, hiding under a superficial layer of rubbish.
And in a flash, I realize that this house is teaching me something new about my mom.
* * * * *
In The Weeds
After decades of long distance friendship, my old work bestie and I are visiting face to face.
In real life, back in our early twenties as young public accountants on the rise, she and I were the jokers, the pranksters, the hilarious comedy team of our office, ready to lighten up every work-related situation we encountered with our own brand of wacky antics.
And now, many years later, our dream selves are settling back into a living, breathing friendship again, and not quite sure how to proceed.
My friend breaks the ice. "Here, let me show you this pic I sent my sister today."
Though I didn't know her well, real-life Sister Susan was the closest thing my friend and I had to a third wheel, a soul sister who parried with the same blade of humor as we did.
Dream-me leans into my friend's phone with great interest.
What I see is a photo of a beautiful, traditional two-story white house with shutters standing at attention, a glossy black front door, and a gleaming brass door knocker.
Clearly, this is Susan's home.
And all along the front edge of the gorgeous house, where surely the original photo had captured an elegant bed of manicured evergreen shrubs skirted with a row of flourishing annuals, my friend has Photoshopped in a tangled mass of overgrown weeds, flopping this way and that along the front of the house in complete disharmony. And Photoshopped into the midst of that unsightly mess, as if they'd been tossed tail over tea kettle into the scruffy brush, lie several large plastic children's toys - a playhouse, a doll buggy, a small slide - their bright colors faded from the sun; a red rusted wheelbarrow crash landed on its side; and several other garish castoffs.
I look from the phone to my friend's face which has lit up with a fiendish smile. "Susan's preparing to sell her house," she whispers, and with a finger, points my attention back to the caption under her masterpiece: "Ready for Zillow."
We both double over in laughter.
* * * * *
Negative Space
I am chatting with a man I've just met, and we discover a mutual passion for international travel. "Oh, tell me where you've been and what you've seen!" he encourages me. So I launch in.
Somehow, I manage to describe in accurate detail the actual countries I've visited in my waking life, and some of my favorite real-life adventures. I talk about motorbiking the streets of Vietnam, drinking coconut milkshakes in Malaysia, learning how to haggle with auto rickshaw drivers in India.
My new friend listens with rapt attention while I wear myself out. Then, politely, I ask, "What about you?"
In a voice that sweeps over me like a cool ocean breeze, he calmly and steadily replies, " My wife and I are interested in visiting not the land of new places but the water. We fly into a new city and travel straight away to the water's edge, where we arrange for a boat or a ship to take us out to sea. And we spend all of our time in the water - swimming, scuba diving, that sort of thing. We visit the water, not the land."
As he speaks these words, in my mind, I see my mental map of the earth transformed. The continents, normally illuminated as the objects of my attention and dotted with the cities, mountains, and points of interest that have always seemed so important to me, suddenly dull and fade away to formless grey.
At the same instant, the oceans and seas of the planet, normally colored a uniform, flat blue, come alive. Shades of blue intensify in different regions - polar seas take on an icy silver hue; tropical shallows warm to turquoise, the vast deepness of the western Pacific hums dark navy - and the entire body of earthly waters begins to glow as if lit from within.
In shock and amazement, I look back at the man, and carefully, he looks at me. Then we smile, and I know that we understand each other.
* * * * *
More dreams that I've dared to describe in detail. Who knows? You may just find them interesting.
These are great dreams. The kind that both enrich and inform. God often talks to us through ourselves in dreams.
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