Monday, July 11, 2011

Dreams

What do you dream about? I mean the ones your brain feeds you while you sleep, not your aspirations.

Are your dreams literal or abstract? Black & white, or technicolor?

My dreams, while they vary wildly, tend to follow a certain theme. Apparently I suffer from an undiagnosed hero disorder, because I am forever trying to solve problems, rescue people, and otherwise keep Armageddon at bay while I sleep.

Except for the ones where the world becomes overrun with cats. In those dreams, I just exult in all the cats everywhere. 

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But I digress.

Do you ever wonder what your dreams say about you? I am considering including a dream sequence from an actual dream I had, in a piece for publication. And suddenly I wonder, how much will this dream reveal about me, that I never intended to reveal?

I wish my dreams included more about my husband and kids. When I meet my husband in my dreams, I don't know him. I just have a vague sense that I like him, and I would like him to come with me while I try to rescue the Girl Scout camper from drowning in the lake. The kids almost never appear, unless they are grown up and I don't recognize them even in my dream-conscious.

In my understanding, we only dream about things that we didn't process enough during the day. So it makes sense that if the kids consume 99% of my waking thoughts, I don't have a continuing need to think about them at night.

Except I just remembered I do dream about my Rooster boy. Once I dreamed he fell off a ladder and his round baby head popped off. Horrified me so much I shot straight up in bed and couldn't go back to sleep.

And two nights ago, I dreamed I was chasing 6 year old Rooster down a long and windy road. Every time I thought I caught up with him, he was inexplicably further down the road. Finally, at the last house, I found him and took him home with me, along with the additional little boy we found there. And good thing, too, because the minute we got home a giant tree fell on that house, and that little boy would have been killed--

Rats. It's just another hero dream.

But seriously, I have been putting the kids to the back burner more than usual these past few weeks. I know it's just for a brief season before we start homeschool and spend all our hours together ad nauseum, but I still struggle with feeling like an adequate mom right now.

I think the exercise of putting a book idea together has been an amazing boost to my being-born writing career. The next step seems natural, of putting together a speaker sheet and beginning to communicate intentionally about the connections between spiritual truth and the physical world.

But these kids, they are young for such a brief time. I don't want to blink and realize I missed it. I am really looking forward to starting homeschool with them in a few weeks, after the rush of this amazing conference has passed. Just ten more days of crazy writing hours. . . .

It is just about time to stop the dream-conscious from using them as characters in my nightly apocalypse dramas.

What have you been dreaming about lately? Care to share?

2 comments:

  1. in hi-def color, sounds, tastes, and smells, i have strangely sci-fi improbable dreams. they frequently are in another language, have entire worlds with history and mythology created around it. in the midst of that i am trying to attend class, find something, or escape something else.

    often i fly.

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  2. It does not surprise me that you probably have the most interesting dreams of anyone. Fly free, dear friend.

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