Dream Explained

I wrote about a dream where I saw myself sitting on a blue marble bench. Because it stuck with me in my waking hours, I wrote about it and that helped me release its hold to me. I have a personal conviction about dreams. I believe they have meaning. I believe that if I work at it, I can discover the reason why my mind needs to work on something in my unconsciousness, because I'm unable to work on it in consciousness. Sometimes that's because I don't have time or it's too difficult. Here's what I discovered about the blue marble bench.

1) It exists. In fact there are four of them outside the building that houses the preschool where I volunteer.

2) My volunteer work is teaching young children music, and I sing many of the songs I sang to Caitlin when she was alive.

3) I love teaching young children music. I teach them to use their voices, to learn to move creatively to music, to pay attention to life with their ears not their eyes, and to express themselves through creating their own songs and musical sounds. It's rewarding work, when teachers and parents tell me that their children love music, but more importantly when they tell me that they see that their children are musical (when they never were before). Of course they are! Music develops as a mode of expression long before speech, but I digress.

4) My heart was in deep sorrow every time I sang those songs and watched little precious faces light up -- faces that were not my child's face. And one of those cold blue benches was where my heart sat, while the rest of me nurtured other people's babies. I don't resent that nurturing, it's the kind of mother Caitlin has. I am, however, distressed that I nurture my child's memory and no longer nurture her in this physical realm.

And that I believe, is the meaning of the dream of the blue marble bench.