In this dream lives a story that someone could easily take and weave into a movie or book one day. As with most all dreams, what appears on the surface is not necessarily a reality, but more likely symbolical - maybe a prediction or fear or wish. Someone might weave this dream into a story of an omen of a thing to come or a reflection of a thing that happened. Because I know this story, I know it is a thing that happened. Because I know this story, I do not have to decipher the dream's meaning. Because I know this story, I know that it is not a prediction but a reflection.
There are two types of dreams. Those you can consciously control. Those where you design in your mind with hopes and desires. Those you formulate with eyes wide open. Then there are those you weave while you sleep. The ones you have no control over how they play out. Doctors say that every person must dream in their sleep or they will die. Strange, that the dreams we have no control over and can be bizarre and incomprehensible are those that sustain our existence, while those we tediously and reverently take time to meticulously create in our waking hours sometimes feel like they will be the ones to kill us.
When I gave birth to my twin daughters, I had so many dreams for them. Never in any of those dreams did I hope a day would come where one of them would suffer with identity dysphoria and one day announce that she did not identify as female, was not comfortable in her female body and ultimately make the decision to reassign her gender. If you took a dream that seemed beautiful and perfect on the surface and then twisted it into a nightmare, that would describe how it felt when I learned this about one of my beautiful twin daughters.
Fortunately, with sleep-induced nightmares, you always wake before you fall to your death. The problem with wakeful nightmares is you have to find your way out of them before you allow them to devour you. With one, your mind saves you. With the other, your awake mind can destroy you.
This all sounds dramatic and crazy, but it's sort of like you are walking along on this straight path and then suddenly find yourself in a maze you can not find your way out of, and so, it feels crazy and frantic for a time. You find it nearly impossible to align everything into a place in your mind where it fits comfortably because your original dream is shattered into a million tiny pieces you have to figure out how to put back together again to survive. A dream you believed you needed and wanted and worked hard to design to survive. And isn't that what waking dreams are? Designs we create to survive our lives?
We all encounter times when our dreams are shattered and we have to find a way to go on. Sometimes, after you survive a storm you thought you could never weather, you look back and breathe and see that even through all the drama and craziness you came out stronger and wiser and happier, even, because of the storm. Sometimes, even, the storm you weathered was not really your storm at all, but someone else's. Sometimes you find that, if you are strong enough and brave enough to sacrifice your dream for someone else's ... it helps you both survive.
Letting go of dreams can be very hard. What I am learning through this journey with Chris is how to let go and then design new ones using his desires and hopes as the foundation and a guiding light away from the maze of my broken dreams toward a new path of dreams I didn't know I would ever have ...
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