When you cease to dream, you cease to live.
- Malcolm Forbes
 |
| Week 22: Dream |
I don't remember not dreaming. From long nights as a kid (I'm a long-time insomniac) to daydreaming in class to dreaming intentionally and declaring those dreams publicly, I have always been a dreamer. Sometimes my dreams were nightmares - I could always tell when I had a fever, because I would have the craziest, scariest, most vivid dreams - the stuff Stephen King novels are made of - but thankfully I always woke up before something terrible happened to me. Most of my nighttime dreams are good ones, albeit usually pretty mixed up - people and places and times that don't make sense once I wake up. I dream in color, and I can almost always recall a dream, at least for a short while. I have a few distinct memories of dreams that seemed so real that even hours after waking I still thought my dream was reality. As an adult, I learned the power of dreams, even though I think I'd really already learned that lesson intuitively.
Once, my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Crutchfield, took me out of class and led me down the hall to the shelf full of encyclopedias. There, she pulled out the volume that had the CHE words in it, and introduced me to the word 'Chemistry'. She told me that she thought I would like chemistry, and that I would be good at it, and I believed her. I asked for an got a chemistry set for Christmas that year, and when I started college, I was a chemistry major. While I ended up majoring in zoology instead, I did become a pharmacist - pretty close! Now, I'm not sure I dreamed of being a chemist, but Mrs. Crutchfield knew what she was doing.
Before Rex and I got married, I was having a conversation with his dad about our plans for children. I matter-of-factly told him that I wanted two kids, a boy first, followed by a girl three years later. He threw back his head and laughed uproariously as he told me that was great, but things didn't always turn out the way you want them to. I nodded, and told him I understood that, but that he'd asked me what I wanted, and that's what I wanted. I kind of chuckle when I think about my beautiful children - first David and then Kim, who happens to be 35 months younger than her big brother. Sometimes dreams do come true, just because!
When I was a Creative Memories Consultant, my dear friend Jenny became really invested in the power of dreams and even did dream workshops for us. I've never forgotten the lessons I learned from her. I remember declaring in front of a whole CM regional convention that I wanted to visit all fifty states before the end of my 50th year. I missed it by a week, but made it to state number 50 (Oklahoma) in the same month as my birthday. A few years later, I attended a workshop where we were prompted to complete this thought: "If money were no object, I would....." I didn't remember what I wrote, but as I was packing to move here to Texas (years later), I found that paper. I had written that I would live in a house on the water, near the ocean, and that the house would be big enough for friends and family to fill it with love and laughter. And here we are...
Travel has always been a big part of my dreams, and many of my younger friends have told me how jealous they are of my travel schedule and ask me how I do it. I generally laugh and remind them that when I was their age, my travels were limited to trips to the grandparents' houses, annual trips to the beach, and annual trips to CM conventions. Sometimes you have to let dreams percolate and then wait for the timing to be right to see them fulfilled. Just like my marriage to Rex - we met when we were 17, living in different states and planning to go to college in different states - him in Texas and me in Tennessee. We kept in touch (through snail mail and occasional visits) until seven years later, when the time was right. We were both single and entering in our last years of professional schools (still in different states) but we'd never stopped dreaming of each other - and here we are!
So, if you're not a dreamer, it's time to change that! If you can dream it, you can do it!
