Dreams vs. Reality

I had an absolute bone chilling, terrifying dream not long ago. The raw emotions I felt were so real that, when I awakened, I quite literally pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t still in my nightmare. Because, like the worst possible scenario, this dream hovered just close enough to reality that I couldn’t quite grasp if I was standing in this very world…in my own room in Maine…or in some other, similar, but ‘not my own room in Maine'. The scariest aspect of this experience was how close to my real life the dream began---a dull normal morning, before all sorts of dreadful possibilities ran amuck during a seemingly average day. Like Job, I felt tested beyond my measure. But, unlike Job, my faith was not only shaken, it was shattered.

When I’ve had a bad dream before, I have shaken it off, and simply fallen back to sleep. At the very worst, I’ve gotten up, made sure Jeff, the kids and the animals were all breathing healthfully, made certain the doors were locked, had a cup of Chamomile tea and returned to bed. For the first in my life, I had absolutely no interest in curling up and sleeping.

After I poked my husband a dozen times, finally poking harder and loudly saying “Oh ! Are you awake too?” and I described each aspect of my terror, Jeff reassured me (as I’m sure most husbands would do at 2 am) that all of these events I’d witnessed in my dreaming state simply couldn’t happen. Certainly not all at once.

Of course, I did fall back to sleep…not that night, but the next. And, my lurid terror did not return. For that, I’m grateful. I did, of course, put up a dream catcher, pull out my favorite pink blanket and thought seriously about smudging the room.

However, the experience did get me thinking about frightening experiences and reality. Most of the time, when we dream, our subconscious enters a world we know, on almost every level, can’t exist. But, we enjoy it. We exalt in it. It’s delightful to be able to visit worlds in which we can fly, we can breathe underwater, we can visit that ‘someplace over the rainbow’…knowing all the while that it’s simply a visit. Even with bad dreams, much of the time, we can, even in a dream state, think “Thank goodness this isn’t real !”, when Godzilla is ripping the roof off your house. When we see a scary movie, or we sit around a campfire telling ghost stories at camp, we allow ourselves to feel that exhilaration that comes with adrenaline. But, when we cross that line from knowing something can’t possibly happen into the realm of possibility, we enter into a place of darkness and uncertainty.

It’s no wonder I had a terrible dream. I had been reading “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” by Ismael Beah. I had had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Beah speak at my daughter’s prep school in Massachusetts, and he captivated me. He is a handsome, eloquent and dynamic young man, and his manner was of one completely comfortable in his skin. I knew part of his story from his talk, but nothing could have prepared me for the childhood he experienced in his home of Sierra Leone. Mr. Beah’s story has the happiest ending it could: he’s survived and is thriving. So, in all honesty, I should have felt relief and happiness for him. But, happiness is a hard emotion to conjure when you read his story…not matter how much he has overcome.

In Yoga, “awake or asleep, life is a dream of our own creation. Enlightenment is awakening from our self-imposed delusions so that we may live and serve others to the fullest of our potential”, according to Dr. Joseph Dillard, a dream yogic specialist. Terrifying as dreams can be, and as frightening as places in the world may become, we do have the privilege of creating our own realities. This may mean facing our fears, or it may mean learning to process stress in a different method. This is far more useful way than poking your spouse repeatedly in the wee hours. My mother has long had a quote taped above her desk from St. John of the Cross: “I am not made or unmade by the world’s devices, but by my reactions to them”. We can’t stop terrible things from happening. We can’t go back and undo the fighting that’s been going on in Africa or the Middle East. We can’t wipe away 9/11 or the Holocaust. But, we can choose what causes to support, what actions to take and what small steps we can do to make the world a far better place. In doing so, we may find that we slay our own dragons in the process.