Dreaming

My little sister has been dreaming about my marriage for years. Every so often, when we are talking on the phone, she will say, as if it is a matter of great significance, “Leibniz, I dreamed that you got married." And then she'll go into details: "He was twenty-seven years old, I think he had brown hair, and I really liked him.” The implication is that I ought to keep my eyes open for a twenyt-seven year old with brown hair, because he just might be the person I'm supposed to marry. I always laugh at these dreams, but they seem to make my sister happier than almost any other dream, and I find this fascinating because, being the oldest child, I really don’t know what it’s like to long for a sibling’s marriage.

I myself haven’t had many dreams about being married, but I’ve had a few. Most of them involve marrying some unidentifiable male, and a couple have involved marrying an unidentifiable male and knowing he was not the one I wanted to marry, and the horrible feeling that accompanied this dream assures me that, if I ever am actually faced with that sort of situation, I will not follow through with the marriage.

Once I married someone I knew. In a dream, I mean. That was strange. I had had a crush on him at one time, but that time was long past, and in fact I rarely saw him anymore, and I knew he wasn’t the kind of person I could ever see myself being with, so the dream puzzled me. Dreams like that are interesting because they bring all sorts of unexpected emotions into real life. I had no desire to renew my friendship with this young man until after the dream, and suddenly I had this urge to see him again, to find out what he'd been up to in the last year or so, and to re-establish the acquaintance. As the day went on and the dream faded, so did those feelings, and I never did renew the friendship, because I don't tend to assume that dreams really mean much of anything.

I haven’t married anyone in my dreams lately, and right now I don’t really have any guys for my subconscious mind to seriously latch onto. I know that I am leaving at the end of the summer, and so I don’t really expect anything to happen, nor do I expect any guy to seriously consider a relationship with someone who will be going off to get a four or five year advanced degree in just a few months. There is, of course, the guy I was supposed to marry (see my earlier post) but he unknowingly threw a wrench in my roommates’ and my carefully contrived plans, and alas it is not to be. And there is the Guy I Am Secretly In Love With, who I am really not secretly in love with because he has been in my ward long enough for me to know that he wouldn’t really be interested in me, and so I can just have fun with it, and laugh giddily about him with my roommates, without getting my emotions all tied up. And those two guys are about as serious as my potential romantic interests get right now.

But this past week I had two dreams in a row that threw me a little off balance. They involved a boy I know, and I can’t say that the association my mind conjured up was completely random because I have wondered if he is the kind of person I might like, but my conclusion has been, “nope, probably not, nor am I the kind of person he might like.” And then I put it out of my mind and forgot about it, until the first dream.

I don’t remember a whole lot about the dream, except that later in the dream there was something about singing with my ward choir and making some horrible mistakes in front of the congregation. But that came after the incident of note. In the dream, I was walking with a group of friends, including The Boy, and I don’t remember who the other friends were. What I do remember is that one of the other friends made it quite plain that she thought I ought to be walking up with The Boy, and finally, when she found herself side by side with him, she stepped away and gave me a blatantly expectant look, and I remember thinking, you don’t have to be so obvious about it, because I didn’t want The Boy to notice. He did notice, however, but instead of being weirded out by the attempted matchmaking, he seemed almost relieved that he didn’t have to make the move, and smiled at me, and then took my hand, and just like that we were a couple and it was an exciting feeling mainly because things really don’t happen so easily in real life.

So when I woke up I wondered why in the world my mind had decided to put me together with this boy. It left me with a surprisingly good feeling, and that feeling stayed sort of at the back of my mind for most of the day.

I would have just let it go at that if I hadn’t had another dream the very next night. In this dream, I was at a family reunion. We were at the beach (there’s some truth to that—our family reunion this year will take place on the California coast). Some of my cousins and aunts and uncles were there and there was a boat and swimming and this disgusting food item in plastic cups that was supposed to look and feel like wet sand, and turned out to taste like wet sand mixed with Sprite. And then I was standing in the kitchen of a beach house or something and having a conversation across the counter with The Boy (goodness knows why he was at our family reunion) and it was a nice, easy, balanced conversation where we were both interested in what the other had to say, and I came away from the conversation thinking, “I just really, really like that boy,” and in my dream I felt just how much I liked him, and was thrilled that he seemed to like me back. And that feeling, that I really, really liked this boy stayed with me when I woke up.

I was a little shaken by the second time. Either dream by itself would have made me step back and wonder about The Boy, but two in a row threw my emotions completely out of wack. I don’t even know him all that well—he is an acquaintance, but that’s about it, and he’s not likely to become anything more than an acquaintance. But dreams can powerfully affect your emotions, and those two dreams completely changed the way I looked at this boy…and I wasn’t sure I liked that.

So the next night I went to bed and thought, “if I have a third dream, I’ll start to wonder if this really means something.” The second dream I could chalk up to the fact that the first dream had put The Boy on my mind, but three dreams would be a little bit of overkill.

Fortunately I had a nice, peaceful night’s sleep, and if I did dream about him, I don’t remember it now. So no worries—he is not the unexpected man of my dreams (oops - no pun intended, really) and I can go back to being my normal, presently unromantic self for a little while.