It's all a dream

[Wayne Guinn]

Some times as a child, I would awaken in the wee hours of the morning scared beyond belief.  When this happened, I would cry out for my parents in the next room.  Thankfully, at least one of them would always respond.  They would enter my bedroom asking, " What's the matter?  What could possibly warrant such screams?". I would then proceed to tell them.  I would say, " I was just running from a horrible monster, not more than a minute ago!", and I would be saying so in a most frantic voice.  The parent who responded, would usually respond to my panic in or about like this. They would say, " Oh now calm down.  I know that what just happened to you was scary, but it was only a dream. You had a nightmare."  I'm willing to bet your parents responded similarly.

Now the thing is, is that while I was very grateful to have my parents warm, loving, comforting presence there with me. Something about the words they used to try to comfort me didn't quite feel right in my tummy.  I didn't know then, why I felt so off in the tummy, but I believe I do now.

What my well meaning and loving parents were trying to do was to, simply, comfort me.  This they did in about the only way they knew how.  Which ultimately was to invalidate the entire experience I just had.  "Nothing 'really' happened to you. It was 'just' a dream!"  When they did this they unknowingly just took the experience I had just had, of facing monsters and demons, away from me.

Now the experience of facing monsters and demons, from differing perspectives, may have indeed been just a "dream", but that does not change the FACT that they were experiences non the less.

Alas, the lesson I would now have preferred to come away with as a child, is this.  "How Great you are! For you have created and come face to face with some of the most horrid monsters known to the imagination. And after having such an extraordinary experience. Here you still are! An indestructable timeless being who can and does have any experience it calls unto itself!"

This is not to say that my parents, and perhaps yours, didn't have a certain wisdom to their words either.  After all, if they had not seperated this dream we call the "real world" from your other dreams, by telling you that monsters and demons don't exhist here. Then we might have actually brought those monsters and demons into this "real world" experience and really over stimulated ourselves.

The only slight hang up with that philosophy of, it's just a dream, is that now, when people like me come along to tell you that what you call "real life" is just a dream.  Well, you probably begin to see the problem.  Real life you say, can't possibly be a dream, because dreams, are not real.  At least, that's what Mother and Father used to say to comfort me after the most terrifying of experiences. And you know what? It really seemed to 'work'.

And work well it did!  From my point of view now. It worked a little too well!!