Change is constant. If we are alive, we are in a dynamic state … we truly never stop until we die. (Or do we? Does the soul continue? Another question for another day.) Even when it doesn’t feel as if we are in motion, we are … blood is flowing, cells are regenerating, the brain is sparking.
I used to have a recurring dream … one that I had nearly every night from my mid-20s when my marriage began to the day after my divorce was final. In this dream, I was living in a house with seemingly endless doors that opened into new and often larger, airy rooms. I was always amazed, even after opening numerous doors over the course of the decade or two of dreaming this same dream. Stairs would also exist in some of the rooms, and one night, I tentatively walked up a set and saw yet a new wide-open space on the second floor — a space that was welcoming me to design and customize it for my liking.
There was never a person that I recall in my dreams … until that last dream. I recall waking up that morning, and realizing that the dream ending had changed. I wasn’t still in a newly discovered room. Rather, I had opened a door — on the first floor, as I remember — and it opened outside where my eyes were flooded with sunlight. It was warm and inviting … and two people appeared, first as silhouettes, and then I saw their faces. Weirdly enough, one was Rush Limbaugh who I despised for his hateful rhetoric; and the other was my father, who I loved and adored. My father guided me out safely, and Rush disappeared into the darkness. I am not sure what this all meant, but since the dreaming coincided with the course of my marriage – from start to end, and my husband was now gone (including his politics, which may be why Rush was there!), it was a sign of some sort. I was searching, I discovered, I accepted, and I moved on … that is how I analyzed it at the time.
The last scene of that final version of my dream was the back of me, walking away, and now I think I must have been moving on to a fresh start. It is as if I left the old me and saw the bright future of a new me. I often wonder what happened to that confined physical space where my mind resided in that dream over the years. I now know that new horizons had beckoned me, giving me the courage and the strength to leave that former painful inner self who was trapped indoors and allowed me to move outside to the world of endless possibilities, to embrace the unknown.
