I treasure my memories because contained in my mind I have buried an endless source of events that I find myself digging out from time to time to help me see, relive, and enjoy so many beautiful and wonderful moments. Inside the biochemical reactions in my brain, neurons have found a way to store just about everything that is important to me. Childhood faces rush to the surface making me smile, as one by one remind me of how lucky I have been to share with these individuals that somehow touched my life. Friends, family, and even pets come pouring out of my gray matter forming images of what they looked like at the time that they were filed away in my head. Without any effort or control a message that tells my lips to create a smile instantly performs its duty and an overall feeling of well being takes over my mood and emotions. I've said it before and I will say it again, what a wonderful gift this ability to recall our past is for us sentient beings! My life, just as yours, is not just composed of great happy memories. If you have been reading this blog you can surely recognize that sadness has also touched me in many ways throughout my days. In fact, not to sound overly dramatic since I have seen many more heart breaking events happen to family members and friends, but if I were to assign a color to describe my own life, I would definitely not pick pink. I'd say that if pink represented a beautiful perfect life, and black one of terrible hardships, pain, and despair, mine is more like a lite melancholic shade of blue. Probably something like the blue of the rocket ship rocker and the background sky in the picture above. In other words, my life experiences have added many colors to my emotional state. Just as expected, the abundance of positive moments has overruled the typically expected gray that comes from the physics of mixing too many colors. It is for this reason that I am so grateful to God, since I am fully aware that He has been very good to me overall. I share the above so that you will not be misguided when I start to describe the topic of this post, my dreams.
Lately I have been having some of the strangest dreams. While I was in Puerto Rico on vacation during the Christmas holidays I mentioned to my mom that for several days in a row I dreamt that I was in a wheelchair. Interestingly, none of the dreams actually had much to do with me not being able to move from the waist down, instead the plot typically carried on as most of my dreams do, but instead of me walking...I rolled. Almost instantly, once I told her that I was dreaming that I was unable to walk, in my next dream I simply had an accident and died instead. I think I liked it more when I was rolling than when I was a stiff. Most recently I have had several dreams in which I have been ordered to serve in the war. In my dreams I find myself making out my last will and testament, plus preparing all of those that are in my life to the cold realization that I would probably not come back once I was sent to Afghanistan. Even though I work for the Department of Defense, my job as a civil servant does not require me to actively participate in the risky and dangerous reality of war, so in essence the plot of my dream is far from being a possible outcome in my life. In fact, if it were not because of the repetitiousness of the dream in itself, I would probably not even remember it at all. What is it exactly that my mind is processing while I am asleep that takes its shape in this particular kind of dream? Is it important, should I be concerned, and does it matter in any way that I am having these dreams?
Even though I am curious and wonder the meaning of these kind of dreams, in real life I am not feeling ill, have no plans to do anything of significant risk, and am most definitely not depressed. So why would my subconscious decide to play such a strange game by untangling my life with such radical conclusions? It is true that sometimes I feel exhausted with having to deal on a daily basis with so much sadness because of my lack of power over my son's complicated personality and behavior, but never to the extreme of wishing myself dead. On the contrary, the more tired I get from this unavoidable part of my life, the more resigned I am to the reality that God must have a plan and that I am needed here to be part of it. In fact, the hidden wheelchair metaphor in my dreams probably makes a lot of sense, since it surely represents my feelings of acceptance to my powerless role in the life of my son. Dying, that on the other hand is just plain weird, don't you think? Unless of course it might represent an unavoidable end to some part of my life. In other words, some things just come to an end regardless of what we try to do to avoid it.
What are dreams anyway? One school of thought is that dreams are how our subconscious interprets certain emotions we are dealing with at the moment. Others believe that at nights, dreams are a sort of cover up that hides the actual process of filing our thoughts. The actual process of archiving memories is a mystery and the research conducted on the subject reveals very little with respect to why we dream, much less the subject matter of our dreams. One thing is for sure, the alternate reality created in our minds while we are asleep, many times seems just as real as our awaken state of reality. This in essence is related to the school of thought about dreams in which it is believed that if one collects enough of our dreams and analyze their content and learn about the individuals daily life, eventually we can quantitatively find a consistent pattern within them that basically represents a continuation of our wake state that reveals our conceptions and concerns. In fact, the University of California in Santa Cruz has a study titled "The Quantitative Study of Dreams" which is extremely interesting and insightful. Me being an engineer and scientist at heart, I tend to gravitate to believing the enlightening results from this study.
So if my dreams are actually a continuation of my wake state which over time reveal many of my conceptions and concerns, then it might be safe to say that just one or two dreams are not enough to give a big enough picture of what is in my head. After all, my conceptions and concerns are definitely complicated to say the least. However, this is assuming that someone else is in charge of interpreting my dreams, not myself. For a stranger to be able to make a reasonable interpretation, he or she would require that I kept a journal of my dreams for years before they could truly gauge what they are all about. the interpreter would also be required to get to know me and the people I interact with in order to make any reasonable comparison of their interpretation versus my wake state life. However, since I myself am aware of what my wake state life conceptions and concerns are, plus I have better access to the details contained in my dreams, it stands to reason that with enough practice I should be able to interpret my dreams better than anyone else. Of course, this line of thought stands true for all of you individually too. It is most likely that nobody can make more sense of your own dreams than yourself.
What could any of this have to do with parenting, you may ask? Well, in essence it probably has everything to do with parenting since knowing and understanding myself is fundamental in my ability to guide my children in any way. If I do not know the true reasons for my own concerns, how can I in all fairness expect my children to understand me? The stronger I have a grasp of my own beliefs, the clearer and healthier the motive of my concerns become, allowing me then to be consistent and fair with my children. Nobody really likes the "because I said so" answer to the frequently asked question of "Why?" Is it not more effective to have a good reason to why your children should not run with scissors? Of course that is an easy one, but wait until your child wants to know why he or she should not do drugs, not have sex, not to drink alcohol, or simply why they should believe in God. What I have discovered is that with my son, the answers that my own parents gave me are simply not enough. I must find in my own conceptions and concerns the true reasons to answer those questions in order to be heard and hopefully believed. The credibility of my words is only as good as my ability to truly relate my life to what I am saying, and for this I need to know myself very well.
I might initially feel confused when I dream of myself on a wheelchair, but then eventually I understand how powerless I have been feeling lately with regards to the situation with my son. It definitely bothers me to dream of myself dying, but there is no surprise to this dream either, since in essence I, like all of us, am dying a little bit at a time from the day I was born. I cannot run away from the fact that I am a mortal. Being sent to war is another way of my mind making me face the facts that I am not in charge of everything, some of my life is truly out of my hands and most definitely unavoidable. Those are just recent dreams, a few in thousands that I believe adequately define my current conceptions and concerns. I like my life regardless of the challenges that I have faced, so I assure you that I do not mind its color. Even though I gravitate towards wearing black and gray, when it all comes off, yes, a melancholic shade of blue is who I truly am.
Dad
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