Dreaming Our Values

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Freedom .

 

I’ve learned to pay attention to my dreams. All of them. The prophetic, the mundane, the symbolic.

It’s funny what we learn about ourselves and what we value. Last night, they were intense.

In one dream, I was in my car and I was driving. My passenger was a man, though I don’t particularly remember seeing him in the dream, just feeling him there in the front seat with me and sensing his closeness. We were in motion, lots of activity around us, lots going on. And we liked each other very much.

We drove into an ultra nice neighborhood, the street lined with lushly landscaped gardens and towering mansions. I pointed out the huge white house on the left, the home of a physician I knew in my childhood, though this was not my hometown. Its opulence was intimidating…or had been. More of the same to our right.

Nonchalantly, I explained to my passenger that these were the homes of the wealthy doctors and dentists I’d known in my past. The kind of neighborhood where I had not belonged as a child. They were pretty, these mansions, many of them, with lovely gardens, and I was in a place in my life where I could have bought any of these homes or built a new mansion between them. It was merely a fact though, not a dream or a desire. We were simply observers and not particularly interested in the material wealth all around us.

Flying By Night novel

At the end of the street was a large cul-de-sac and a little park of sorts that overlooked the shimmering water of the Gulf or the Atlantic, I wasn’t sure which. We found a quiet place to park, a sweet spot alone, where we could simply watch the water and sit and talk and enjoy each other’s company.

And, amid all the real estate around us, that…that was the true wealth.


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