In Dreams....

My alarm was set for 6:00 AM. Grim. But, I had promised to give Laura a lift to her job this morning as opening barista at Tully's Coffee downtown.

My eye popped open one minute before the alarm was to go off; isn't it funny how an internal clock can be so precise? I was awake (briefly) at 4 AM and realized that twelve hours from that point I'd be in the midst of the gynormous (love that word) meat fest BBQ we are hosting today. That's a different story however; post and pictures to come.

Sometime between the 4 AM thought about the BBQ and the eye-popping-open moment a minute shy of 6 AM, I had a dream; a weird dream. Aren't they all? What are these dreams anyway; these shadowy journeys into the interstices of our consciousness? Although we are supposedly dreaming nightly, I personally recall dreams only rarely. They are almost always focused on bizarre meetings of random people in my life.

I dreamed of a house by the sea, apparently owned by the person who has been a thorn in my side and who I've written about in a tangential way on several blog posts over the last few months. She was a complex but emotionally neutral figure in the dream. She had lived in this house by the sea for decades and (somehow....isn't that always the word we use?) I found myself there with other people that I didn't know and for an unclear purpose. There were old photo albums, books and memorabilia of her days gone by on the shelves of a home library complete with comfortable overstuffed but weathered chairs, draped with crocheted wraps which were very inviting. I found an album, pulled it from the shelf and paged through the pictures only to spot a photograph of my sister, her then toddler daughter in tow, posing with this woman in that very house by the sea. My sister had been in the house by the sea for an event. How odd, I thought. How did my sister know this woman so long ago?

I learned, in the dream, that my sister was attending a reception in this house by the sea to raise awareness of the benefits of home birth (go figure). The event was attended by midwives and spokespersons for the cause. Everyone looked so happy in the photograph. I wondered how this woman could have been in my sister's life decades before she re-appeared in the lives of our collective family and how she could have become such a thorn in the present day. The festivity of the photograph and the serenity of my presence in the moment inside that house by the sea made no sense to me.

Ahhhhh, the nature of dreams. Wispy and wonderful, a chance to linger in the midst of the unknown, dreams are forgotten quickly if not spoken or written down. Already, an hour later, details are fading into the creases of my mind.

Perhaps in our dreams we try to heal wounds. Or perhaps in dreams we pull in people from our lives present and past and toss them into bizarre settings because whether we acknowledge so or not, we still have things to learn from them, work to be done on the deepest level. We're striving to make sense of the unexplained as we sleep.

These musings take me away on a morning when the house is quiet, before the meat fest whirlwind begins, as I sit with my coffee just thinking about things......