Pearls of Wisdom

I'm going to admit to something that is going to sound bizarre, and I know it's bizarre, and I fully embrace my hypocrisy when I saw that I don't believe in the supernatural and I don't believe in anyone who says they have interactions with ghosts even though I fully believe that my dead relatives visit me in my dreams. There, I've said it. Dead grandparents and uncles visit me in my dreams. I don't expect you to believe me. My therapist certainly doesn't. He thinks that whatever message the dead bring to me in my dreams is a way for my Unconscious to inform my Conscious that it has something important to say. Which might explain some of the messages, but not the messages that I've gotten for other people and that later come true. But let's not dwell on the Twilight Zone experiences, let's, instead, talk about a message that my dead Uncle Larry gave me in a weird dream that included a horse stable and a chimp.

In the dream, my cousin Lauren and I were walking through a modern'ish looking horse stable, which isn't strange since Laur and I took riding lessons as a child. The stable was pristine white and glowing in light. As we reached the end of one hallway, a chimpanzee/human hybrid that was dressed as a stable boy showed up and took me around the bed to a particular horse that I was supposed to see. Lauren in the meantime, was left behind. Around the corner, stood her father (also deceased). He said nothing to me as I pet the horse. But when I turned around, Uncle Larry was there. My uncle -- by the time of this dream -- had been dead only a few months. But he, unlike any of my dead relatives before him, was anxious and had lots he wanted to tell me. Which was interesting because alive, he was kind of a know-it-all and you couldn't tell him anything, so it's not surprising that he had lots to say now that he kinda did know it all, if you know what I mean. What surprised me about this dream, is how sick I felt through the whole thing. How vivid and fully realized. How desperate he was to tell me things. After I awoke from the dream, I felt dizzy and disorientated. I sat up, walked over to the dry-erase board and started to write stuff down. All the key elements. Only then was I able to lie back down and go to sleep. The next morning, disturbed by the Uncle Larry dream, I went back to the dry erase board and found these:

Trust yourself and your decisions.

and

Time is an illusion - there are only pockets of now

There were a few other things, but they were more messages for other people than they were for me, but these were definitely for me. While the first message: Trust yourself and your decisions applied directly to something that was happening a year ago and gave me a sense of calm, it's the second message that I have to be mindful of almost every day of my life. You see, I've always lived in the future. "When I'm forty..." I would say. Or, "when I get married..." But these things were always very far away and not important. In fact, I often felt like I've just gotta get through Now, in order to get to the good stuff Later. As my mother used to say to me, "stop wishing your life away, kid."

The way my uncle explained time was like a pearl necklace. Each bead is a moment or experience of your life, and they're strung together on a line. But each pearl is in and of itself important and should be made the most of. Sooner or later, the string ends and you come back to the beginning. His point was, no moment of time was bad, only what you put into it. So, if you're not putting anything into it except for impatience to get onto the next pearl, because, you know, the next pearl is somehow better, you're wasting it. You're just wasting your life one pearl at a time. Which is really sad if you think of it, and if you knew my uncle at all, you would know why it was imperative that he give me this message, because he wasted his life.

I haven't told many people this story, mainly because it would include me confessing these dead people dreams and how imperative they feel to me. And secondly, whenever I have an epiphany, it feels like a firework in my head, but once I say it aloud to someone else it feels like a cliche. I know this, because when a friend asked us to write inspirational sayings on her FB wall in order to help her get motivated to change her life, I wrote, "Time is an illusion. There are only pockets of now. Make those pockets count" it felt cliche and flimsy. Like I had sold out something that meant something to me.

Maybe that's the point of the dead people dreams. Maybe some of them aren't supposed to be shared. I guess if the message isn't supposed to be given to my mother, or my cousin, or a close friend, then the message really is just for me. Whether it's my Unconscious or my dead Uncle Larry, I should just keep them to myself. (And from now on, I will, too. Ahem...)