I had lunch today with a psychologist friend of mine, and when I told him that I not only slept last night (I had trouble for a whole week not sleeping well) but I also dreamed again. And I hadn’t even thought about how much I missed my dreams until I had one last night. He said to me in his best psychologist voice, “Aha! That’s why you were so out of sorts. You had not been dreaming!”
I am somewhat familiar with Carl Jung’s philosophy of dreams, that our dreams give us valuable insight into our subconscious minds, but I think I appreciate my own dreams for another reason. I am a prolific dreamer. I dream in living color and I can smell as well as taste and hear and touch and see in my dreams. They are adventures for me. And I didn’t really even realize how much I enjoy them until they were gone. In fact, I didn’t even realize that I missed them until I had one after a drought of them. Isn’t that the way life is, though? Sometimes we don’t know we miss something, even after it’s gone, until it’s back again. That’s a good enough reason for us to lose things occasionally.
I’ll share my dream with you. I dreamed that my little almost lame pug, Kojak, was going to day care. The day care bus came to pick him up, and I waited outside with him, so I could make sure he got on the bus safely. When the bus pulled up, the door opened, and the bus driver opened her arms to Kojak, and he jumped and soared into her arms. Now, in real life, Kojak can’t walk very well, much less jump and soar. But that’s the cool thing about dreams. They don’t know the boundaries of the waking world. And of course, in real life, Kojak stays home with our other pug Elvis while I’m at work; neither of them go to day care. The dream made me happy because I got to see Kojak so free of his infirmaty, and because I realized how much I missed dreaming.
I also realized that I shouldn’t stop dreaming during my waking hours either. A life without dreams is not a happy life. So, I’ve decided to value my waking and sleeping dreams and to be very thankful that I have both again.
