Recently I have had dreams about people I haven't seen in years. One dream I was sitting and having a conversation with the mother of a friend of mine from high school. I probably have not seen either one of them in over twenty five years. I use to visit my friend and her family when I would go home to Indiana, but somewhere that just petered out. Life. So when I woke up from this dream I thought it so odd and then naturally I worried that her mother was ill. Or dying. And reaching out to me? My mind is full of this type of nonsense and because it lingered with me all that day I decided to Google the mother.
For years I have tried to find my friend via Facebook to no avail. When I Googled her mother I got an article from the local newspaper on a 50th wedding anniversary celebration that included the names of all three of her daughters. From there I looked up my friend's two sisters on Facebook, found them, left them messages, and waited. By that evening I had my friend's phone number and her name on Facebook. Gotta love social media. We texted and agreed to catch up via phone some day when we both had the time.
The next person I dreamed about was a girl I met here in Florida at the gym several months after Darcy was born. She had a son the same age and we started hanging out after we worked out together. We had several fun years together and then she took ill with a back issue that required her to have several surgeries out of state. We lost touch. I don't know what the dream was about that she was in, but since my own back problems I have thought of her often and it wasn't a surprise to me that I dreamed about her. I took to the Internet again to find her. Googling her got me another name for her then the one I knew and that name got me to her Facebook page where I friended her. We have connected, but haven't gotten to chat yet.
My dreams are odd and I've spoken about them before in this blog. If I'm in the dream, I'm in there twice. Once as the person in the dream and also as the Director. The Director Me always thinks odd things aloud. After my dad died I use to dream of him almost nightly. In the dreams he was alive and somewhere in the dream Director Me would say, "Wait a minute. You're dead. How is this possible?" The Director Me is always discovering things in the dream that are odd or couldn't possible be and while she shrugs off a lot of it she also points it out. In the dream.
I have not dreamed about my mother much. I have had maybe a handful of dreams with her in them, but they haven't been very satisfying. Mostly the me in the dream panics at the thought of going back to the way things were with me taking care of her and her in pain and angry. The Director Me points out that this isn't true, that she is in real life dead, but then I usually wake up and feel guilty for feeling that it was a burden. I have had two dreams that were happy and she was the way she was before she got so sick and miserable. Those were nice dreams.
The other night I had some dream that I don't remember. The only part of the dream I remember is a line of people coming through to greet my cousin Jason who is lounging in a comfortable chair holding court. I am beside him introducing him to people. My dad suddenly appears in the line with his smiling face and bald head and he smells of a mixture of cologne and the nasty, sweet, cigar smell that we despised. In the dream I giggle at him and what he says to Jason, but I'm also embarrassed that he stinks as he hugs Jason. I wonder if Jason notices. Then Director Me reminds me that "this is what your mother always meant about his cigar stink. This is what she was talking about." And suddenly the smell was so vivid that I woke up immediately and thought I would surely smell it, but it was gone.
The last person I dreamed about from my past was a teacher of mine. I haven't spoken to him since I was student teaching at the high school I went to. He saw me in the hall and told me he still used my papers in his class. He too is on Facebook and so after my dream, which I don't remember, I sent him a friend request. He accepted it and sent me a very nice email updating me on his life. He asked me to write him back if I was interested and catch him up on my life. Since he was my English teacher in high school I have yet to do that, but I have written several drafts.
Perhaps all of these dreams are telling me to reach out to people from my past. Reconnect. Share stories. So far I've found the three people that I've searched for and hopefully I can continue to communicate with them. I also think I will try to write down what I remember of my dreams. Maybe I'll do a dream post each week with all of my crazy dreams and someone will see them and analyze them or me. What fun!
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