IN MY DREAMS

Most of us wake up some mornings with some remnant of a Dream we had during the night. Occasionally, if we are lucky we remember a little bit about it. More often as we wake up the details slip away.

In my dreams, I don’t especially think that I am working out the problems of the day, although sometimes I feel like I have been running and running and running. It would be nice if all that running took off weight in the morning but it doesn’t mores the pity.

Even while waking however, whether we admit it or not, each of us has a guilty secret and that is a dream about what our perfect world would be. For some of us, another person is in the dream too, although that person may just be a set of characteristics and personality traits that we might like to see.

Sometimes we dream of places we would love to see. I hate to say it, but often the real place is more interesting than we can imagine it. I think of my return last September to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle on one hot day and actually seeing Venice again 3 months after that first incredible visit.

I don’t know why some places resonate with us and make us so happy but they do. There is something familiar and comfortable about them. Paris surprised me. It started as a week to fill a gap in my schedule on my first trip and ended up being a place and, to my surprise, a people who welcomed me with open arms.

On subsequent trips, to my amazement the magic and the welcome continues, even when I am hours late for an appointment. Quite a surprise and one that showed me, once and for all, that you need sometimes to extend yourself a bit out of your comfort zone and hold your preconceived notions back.

The first and most impressive time I heard someone tell me their dreams was when I was working for the summer between school terms. I will never forget a youngish woman who worked there full time and had 3 children tell me of her happiness.

Since I was about 20 years old myself, her life was definitely not like mine, but she was nice and a pleasant person. Her excitement however, is something any of us understand. She said that all of her life, she had dreamed about having 2 things: a sewing machine and knowing how to type. I was happy for her, and said so, because she was on the eve of having both wishes come true; typing on the job and buying her own sewing machine.

I have to admit though, that even then I knew it would not be as easy for my dreams to be met as hers were…and I was right.

I long ago surpassed any dreams I had in my limited imagination, particularly 
at that time and now mentally rewrite my Bucket List. So far, I am finding that what I have been able to dream up, seems to be achievable at least in terms of travel and geography.

Dreams of people, i.e. the man of my dreams, turned out to be someone completely different from who I ever imagined. He may have passed me on the street dozens of times, but until I met him, I had no idea, that even 4 months before I was born, he was already living next door to where my parents would be living about 25 years later. I was stunned by some of the possible ‘Missed Connections’ there may have been, but maybe destiny and fate had others places and another time in mind.

I am and will always be grateful that we eventually met at the right time and place because, heeding the words of a wealthy but never married uncle, whatever time you got was worth taking and enjoying, because the alternative leaves you alone. He might have added alone for all of the rest of your life, because that was ultimately his fate.

Sometimes I think it is harder to have loved and lost. When I voice this sentiment, there are a lot of people who think I am ungrateful for what I had been given in that so many people never enjoy such a love and life, at all.

The past as we all learn eventually, does not sustain us completely. We are alive and living, not on our memories, but in the present. We need therefore to be ready and open to new experiences.  

In order to be able of fully appreciating the continuing miracle which life offers up to us each day, we need to be open and ready for new experiences. Wherever in life we find ourselves, we need to welcome new ideas, set new goals, and dream new dreams.