Day: April 30, 2013

“It’s like someone has dumped out a big jar of marbles and right now they’re all falling in a clump, but starting to separate out. Then on graduation day all those marbles are going to hit the ground and scatter in hundreds of directions.”
–Kiki’s observations on her last month of high school

Kiki is right, we’ve hit the last free fall before her life trajectory is in her control. She’s really feeling it both in her readiness to be doing something else and in her relationships with her friends. Some of those friendships have become a bit more complicated, people who’ve been close for a long time are beginning to pull apart because they know they’ll soon be headed in different directions. Everything in her world is shifting, simultaneously picking up speed and slowing down. Most days she and I end up sitting down and talking about how things are shaking out. A friend of mine warned me about the last months of high school. She and her oldest daughter quarreled lots during the final run to graduation. I’m glad that Kiki’s emotional shifts have not manifested in a similar manner. Though I won’t be too surprised if they do at some point. It is easier to leave people you love if you create a rift first. One more month and then she’s off into her next adventure.

I am not an advocate of dream theory. Most dreams are random and fairly meaningless, but some are significant. The interpretation of these significant dreams can lead to enlightening insights, but I think that the only person qualified to interpret a dream is the one who dreamed it. This is because the dream itself may be nonsense, but our minds can pull meaning and inspiration from the shape of the nonsense.

In March I had two significant dreams. One featured an amazing house full of amazing stuff and I was going to get to live there, except everything in the house needed cleaning or repair. It was a reflection of my emotional state at that time when it felt like everything could be amazing, if only I did a lot of work first. The second dream I’m not going to share, except to say that it showed me exactly what I feared for Gleek when we were in the midst of wrestling with anxiety. Neither dream was pleasant, but contemplating them helped me understand myself and that new understanding changed the shape of things going forward in good ways.

Sometimes the entire dream is not important, just an element of it. I can tell which pieces matter, because they stay with me even after I wake up, they feel important even if I do not know why. Most of the time what matters most is the emotion of a dream rather than the events or objects in it. In my dreams I feel the things I’ve suppressed when awake.

I’m thinking about all of this because Howard had an interesting dream last night with elements that have been re-occurring over the past 20+ years. I kind of want to assign meanings for his dream, to declare that this dream object represents that life challenge, but I don’t get to. Meaning or dismissal are his to assign. I try to do the same for my kids, teaching them that while dreams can be indicators, it is what we do when awake that changes our lives for better or worse. Dreams show up, what we do with them after that is what matters.