What do our dreams mean?

Last night I dreamed that a friend of mine was dying. It was an ironic choice, because for as long as I have known her, both of her parents have been serious ill. One would be tempted to say terminal, if you didn't know the full story.

Her mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer a couple of years ago. It has not budged, nor has she. And this in addition to a host of other serious, even life threatening illnesses. And yet she's still living...at home...on her own. Working via the computer, even. She is, I think, in her 70's. (I tend to lose track of ages.)

My friend's dad has been in and out of the hospital with congestive heart failure. Pneumonia. Other serious issues. But he is also still hanging in there.

And yet I dreamed, not that her parents had died, but that she was on the verge of dying. What is the message there? And where did it come from?

Are dreams just our tired brain's way of entertaining itself when there is no real external input? A tape running, based on events of the previous day? Or are they messages?

If so, from where? From our own subconscious mind? from G-d? From angels or spirit guides? From the universal energy? Or are they communications from other people?

I would love to know what you think and why. I will post more about my thoughts tomorrow.

A video I just have to share

This is amazing...such a beautiful voice, and words that reach so many of us.....


A Fine Frenzy's Almost Lover

Saying Goodbye to a Friend

There are many ways to lose a friend...

Sometimes one person moves far away, and despite promises to stay in touch and visit often, the days and weeks and miles come between. Conversations become shorter and the times between them longer. Then one day, without anyone realizing it's happening, the two go from "friends" to "someone I used to know."

Other times some one comes between the two, and loyalties are challenged. A new love interest, a new spouse, a new baby...and suddenly there is no time or energy for the way things used to be. We may be sad, but we understand that people change and that sometimes a friend for one season may not be the right friend for another.

Sometimes there is a parting of ways because of a betrayal, and try though they might, the chain of trust has been shattered. And friends become strangers or even enemies.

But the hardest to take is when one never really knows what happened. One day the person is part of your life. You talk, you visit, you make plans, you laugh. And then in what seems like an instant, the other is gone. Calls are refused. Visits cease. And in the online world, your IM's are rejected. You search your heart, trying to understand what you did, what you said. You talk to friends. You go over and over in you head, trying to imagine what went wrong. But still you have no answers. If you do see the person, your questions remain unanswered. You want to know if there is something you can do to make it right again. They don't want to talk. You have ceased to exist for them.

For one of my friends, I have ceased to exist. At some point in the past few weeks, he decided to end the relationship. To close the door. And I cannot understand. But I have to accept.

I wrote early on in this blog about my efforts at non-attachment. And my limited success. And so, in the spirit of learning that spiritual skill, I offer this post. Good bye my friend. I have learned much from you and I am grateful to have had you in my life for the time the universe allowed. The door will always remain open on my side, should you ever wish to walk back through it.

I wish you well in all that comes your way. May your path be one of love and happiness and peace.

Accepting the lessons

I have three friends who went through terrible divorces. All three involved betrayal, deception and more pain than they ever expected. All three are good men who really value marriage and family. And now, years after the papers were signed and the furniture was sorted out, and they moved out into new places, the wounds and the pain are just as fresh, coloring the way they see each and every day, each and every woman who enters their lives.

We all start out in love believing that happy ever after is just a matter of finding the right person. We meet someone and make our plans with stars in our eyes and an unshakable belief that we have stumbled upon the magic -- true love stands before us. And ahead of us, years and years of building the home and family we've always imagined. We are vaguely aware that there will be hard times and disagreements, but we blissfully believe that our marriage will be different and that the disagreements will be few and brief, handled with logic and patience and followed by the sweet delight of making up.

For some people, the dream comes true. Oh, the disagreements might be a bit bigger than they expected, the hardships a bit harder, and the sleepless nights more frequent, but they are happy together. But for others of us, the dreams not only fail to materialize, they come crashing down on us like bricks, leaving us dazed and bruised and battered. Somehow we manage to crawl out from under the rubble, dust ourselves off and wander away, wondering exactly what happened.

The problem comes when we spend the years after the collapse sitting and looking at the demolished dream that was our marriage. People come by, and try to take our hand to lead us to a brighter, cleaner place far from the rubble, but we are too busy trying to reconstruct which brick went where and how the destruction began. Did we miss the cracks early on? Did we fail to see the leaks in the foundation? And the people go away. If we happen to wander away from the place temporarily, following someone's lead, we take some of the rubble with us, lest we forget for a moment what happened. Before long, we find ourselves back at the scene of the crash, back to reconstructing our memories and sorting though the pain.

We tell ourselves we are just trying to figure out what went wrong to avoid having it happen again, and that's good -- at first. But if we stay there as years go by, still searching for clues and sorting through memories, we're missing something important.

We're missing the chance to take what we've learned and build a new and better home for our dreams. More windows for letting in light, more doors for different opinions and new opportunities. A more solid foundation to withstand the tremors, a better roof to keep out the rain. More rooms to give ourselves and our partner more chances to spread out and explore our potential. Brighter colors. Softer cushions.

It's scary to walk away from that first (or second or third) collapse and risk building dreams again. But when it come down to spending the rest of our lives sitting alone with our broken dreams or using what we've learned to try and build again, do we really have any choice?