Dreams

You know how dreams can mirror reality and yet can be surrealistic?

Well. The dream I had last night was like this.

I have been sort of feeling sorry for myself because all my kids have now grown up to at least be in their freshman year of college and therefore living far away from me and my wife. My son has been visiting but he has been so exhausted from his first year of being a father that he mostly has been resting, so the road trip we planned while he was here was  about 7 or 8 hours long from about 2 pm in an afternoon to about 10 to 11 that night. So, I was feeling sort of like life wasn't taking me where I wanted to go exactly.

But, then I had this dream last night that kind of showed me the actual nature of my life and made me realize I'm probably the most free of any person I presently know.

Most people I know either through design or ignorance are a slave to their businesses, their properties, their lives, their families much more than I am. While I was visiting the big Island of Hawaii my friend said to me, "Fred. You have an amazing amount of freedom in your life." I nodded but didn't think too much of this at the time and sort of found myself defaulting to Janis Joplin saying in a song, "Freedom's just another word for nuthin left to lose" even though I don't really believe that.

Yes. I have almost complete freedom in my life now but that doesn't mean much if you aren't sharing this freedom with others I find.

So, then I had this dream last night which somehow changed everything for me. It was like God saying to me, "Create the life you want to live! I have given you complete freedom for a purpose not by accident."

In my dream I owned a very large motor home but I also owned a semi truck that I could drive along with a huge trailer that kept morphing somehow larger and larger and I also had a condo or apartment where I lived with my wife.  A friend wanted to help me get used to driving the semi truck towing the huge morphing trailer. The trailer had a bathroom in it with stairs that came down when I cranked them so I could climb up into the semi trailer. The whole thing felt very surrealistic but very oddly freeing where I saw myself in an entirely different context which might equate best to "perfect Freedom".

I was free in my dream in a way I had never thought of being during my life. I realized that I have been thinking too much like my father who owned a huge motorhome which was a Winnebago and I think it was a 35 footer the last 5 years of his life. I remembered traveling with him in it out to an Electrical  generating dam on the Colorado River and taking a tour of the generating capacity of the dam and walking down inside it with it's huge generators on "Parker Dam" on the Colorado River with my now ex-wife and I and how fun that was to travel in that motorhome.

My wife likes to travel by flying now (because of her knee replacement surgery) and then renting a car wherever we arrive and I remember paying either in Portland or Seattle 2500 dollars to rent a car one week because of the tax of $350 (airport tax) I think in Portland and thinking this was a lot of money to rent a car.

So, the idea of a motorhome towing a jeep or something like that sounds pretty good to me. I could still blog from wherever I was traveling around the lower 48 states and Alaska. I could visit my kids whenever I wanted to and even could take a dog or 2 with us.

So, I guess this dream made me stop feeling sorry for myself that all my kids have grown up now and are in college or graduated already and working with my oldest son having made me a first time grandfather.

I was feeling pretty lost since my youngest went off to college this fall because the last 40 years of my life (since 1974 now) I have been raising one or more children non-stop until my youngest went away to college this fall.

The transition has been very difficult but maybe now life is telling me to reinvent myself somehow.

So, we'll see how creative, practical and fun I can create my future to be (by God's Grace).