To Sleep, Perchance to Dream...

For the past 4 years I have had insomnia. This may be related to the fact that I get up at 4am during the week days to teach a class at 6am. I know my insomnia is not as bad as Inside Stories', but it is still irritating. I think partly because of my insomnia, I don't dream very much anymore. In a way that is good, because if I ever do dream, I pay attention.

I read an article in the paper about dreams. It was very interesting and I wished I had saved it. In this article it said that sometimes when we dream it does mean something. It told about a dream one woman had where she dreamed that she shrunk to micro-scopic size and she went inside her own body. When she woke up she felt like she should go get a physical and when she did, found she had a tumor in her abdomen. This article also said that when we wake up from the dreams, we should note what our thoughts are about the dream.

I remember a dream I had once when I was a child. It is the only childhood dream I can remember, so I guess it must have made an impact on me. I was in the basement of my home and the house was on fire. Against one wall in our basement we had lots of wooden shelves that had bottles of fruit my mother had canned. I was crouched down behind some boxes in front of those shelves. I was hiding with someone else, but I don't remember who it was. At this point, I think it must have been either the little girl who lived next door, or one of my brothers. We were scared because the house was on fire. I don't remember seeing any flames, just smoke. My dad came down the stairs, and I heard my mother yell to him, "Bring up the freezer!" I then watched as my dad hoisted the freezer (quite a big one) onto his back and proceeded to go up the stairs with it. That is when I woke up. I remember thinking what a stupid dream it was. To this day I have never figured it out but just chalked it up as one of those stupid things your mind does when it is asleep and bored.

I have had some significant dreams in my life also. One night I dreamed that I was at a meeting and someone came in to tell me that my baby son had been accidently killed by my oldest daughter who was babysitting him at the time. When I woke up I remember how real that dream seemed to me. I couldn't shake it. I cannot even put into words how real the dream seemed, and how shattered I was by dreaming it. As I told my husband the next morning, he was shocked at how affected I was by the dream. He even chastised me for even dreaming such a dream. But in the end we decided it was just a dream and to forget about it.

A week later I went to a dinner at our church where I had signed up to be on the clean-up committee. As I was finishing up in the kitchen, the president of this organization came to me and said she wanted to talk to me about something. She told me she had had a dream and felt compelled to tell me about it. She then proceeded to tell me the same dream that I had had. Of course as soon as I realized that we had the same dream, I burst into tears. I knew that this was more than a dream.

My husband and I talked about it and decided that maybe we should treat it as awarning and try to be on guard. Because we are religious people we even prayed about it and prayed that if we were, by chance to avert this danger, that we would know that it had passed so we wouldn't have to worry for the rest of our lives.

I decided that I needed to do everything that I could think of to assure the safety of my baby. He was still in a crib but recently had learned how to pull himself up to a standing position. I also had recently moved his crib out of my bedroom into a room with his older brother. After my friend told me about her dream, I decided that I needed to move his bed back into my room. It was a lot of work to take the crib apart and move it back into my bedroom, but after I got it all put back together and got the sheet back onto the mattress, I reached down to pick up the large plastic sack of disposable diapers, and as I went to hang it on the corner of the crib, all of a sudden I realized - THIS WAS IT!! THIS WAS THE DANGER!! Back in those days they made the bags a lot bigger - in fact they were so big that a child, even a toddler, could get the bag all the way over his head and entire body... and then would probably not be able to get it off. Which is probably why they quit making them so big. All of a sudden I realized that this is what my dream - and my friend's dream - was trying to tell me - not to hang the plastic sack of diapers on my baby's crib anymore because he might pull it into the crib, over his head and suffocate. I even then remembered my oldest daughter's words to me one day, telling me I shouldn't put the diaper sack on the crib, but at that time I had told her that there was no way the baby could reach them because he couldn't even stand up then.

Dreams are weird Sometimes they are just the product of a bored or tired mind. Sometimes they are trying to tell us something. So pay attention.