If you really want insight into what's up in your children's psyche, ask them about their dreams. When we wake up, sometimes at dawn, sometimes at noon, we ask each other "Did you dream last night?" Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't.
This morning, (really afternoon, but I didn't want you to know what slobs we are), when Jonah woke up, he climbed up in the big bed, and asked me just that. I told him that I had a lot of dreams the night before, (mostly involving my standard garden variety losing my car in a parking garage and having to walk uphill to get home) and he said so did he.
While I tried to remember some more of what went on in my dreams, Jonah told me about his. It was one of the best ones ever and I need to write it down before it disappears, like tears in the rain. (I lifted the 'tears in the rain' from "Blade Runner" so don't be too impressed.)
Anyplagiarized, he said that in the dream, it was years from now, when I was really old, "like in my sixties or something". I laughed when he said that. We were sitting together in the living room, watching TV and came across a movie that was about my life.
"My life?" I asked. "Yes, your life. It was like that Jersey Shore show on MTV"
"Like a reality show?" I asked, feeling horrified. "Exactly" he said.
My immediate response was "Oh shit". Did my Aunt Evie really get me on "The Biggest Loser"? Or, even worse, I finally won Intervention, or, good Lord, "HOARDERS"!!! This was the insight into the true feelings of my children I had been dreading all my life.
Reluctantly, I asked him if it involved an intervention or camera's barging into our house in general, and did it freak him out? Jonah started laughing that good belly laugh he gives me when I crack him up.
"No, it was about your life and all of the things you've been through."
"We were sitting together watching TV and we stumbled across the movie. We didn't know who made it, and were surprised to find it. It started when you were little and went through all the years and the things that happened to you. There was a lot about how you always tried to help people, no matter what. In one part, you got angry at someone because they were doing something that made you not be able to help them.
In the last scene of the movie, I'm in a car driving through the desert looking for you". Let me mention that we had been in Las Vegas last week for the holidays with our family.
"Am I lost?, Were you afraid?" I ask.
"No, I knew exactly where you were and just needed to drive there. There's a girl in the car, and she's annoyed with me for taking so long. We stop at a truck stop and she runs off with a trucker but I don't really care. I'm kinda glad because she was annoying. So I just get back in the car, and drive some more through the desert, looking for you. And then I woke up."
