Chapter Two

I woke this morning with a sigh. My dreams remained empty. The chaos had stopped and been replaced by benign trivial matters. There was no perfect man waiting for me, I was alone. What did that mean for me? I turned the television on and Joel Osteen was giving his weekly Sunday Sermon. He talked about refusing to verbalize the negative. He talked about refusing to let negativity take over our thinking. He talked about having hope. I watched with an understanding born of logic, not emotion. I changed the channel and there was Joel again, the same sermon, the same points of interest. I watched again. I obviously needed to hear this information twice to make sure it really and truly sunk in. I listened this time to his words and felt them in my soul and knew logic had nothing to do with it, the understanding had to reach beyond my mind and into my heart.

The answer was simple; don’t let the negative find verbalization. Over the last 48 hours I had a dream in which I found hope and now added to the dream was a reminder to eliminate negative verbalization. A reminder, an opportunity, to eliminate my own self-defeating dogma. A reminder that how I see the world is a reflection of how it sees me. I needed to accept I had made mistakes, would possibly make them again, but those mistakes did not mean I was unworthy. I did not need to continue to punish myself till the end of my days for every misstep, wrongdoing, or error in judgment I had made. My directions, my answer, couldn’t be any more blatant. Was I listening was the question?

Eight days early I had begun the task of working my way through The Course in Miracles. With reluctance and trepidation I opened Lesson 8. The headline of today’s lesson stated “My Mind Is Preoccupied With Past Thoughts”. Here I was before 10 am in the morning pondering the fate of my life. I didn’t want to spend another four years getting by. I was tired of being an island, making it on my own and depending on my resilience to get me through. I had discovered I could handle anything from homelessness to illness but that didn’t provide me with the answers I needed.

My mind occupied with the stress, anxiety, feelings of lack and emotional fear had so constricted my thinking I could not move forward. I was consumed by a fear of lack, lack of faith, lack of value, lack of worth, lack of love, and lack of resources. I was afraid to confront my lack and instead attempted to discover new ways to fill the void, instead of eliminating the void altogether. I was continuing to attract these negative scenarios and marginal people and situations into my life because I feared I was not worthy of more. I feared my mistakes, errors, misjudgments, flaws and imperfections. I feared they meant I did not have the value I needed to live a wonderful life. How horribly wrong I had been. How horribly tragic I had allowed my mind and my body to reach this juncture. The universe, God, was giving me the opportunity to change direction. The question I had to ask myself was “Am I willing?” Was I willing to say I AM and associate a myriad of positives to the end of that statement? A quiet tentative emotion laden “yes…yes, I AM ready” verbally escaped my lips. It was the beginning.

Chapter One

He leaned over my shoulder as I sat on the curb staring off into space. He leaned over slowly, pulled my hair back to expose my neck and kissed me. Me! He kissed me, and then he said “Just checking.” For the previous 2 days I had been running around like a psychotic nut, spinning for stressful situation to stressful situation while he watched, made no comment, but occasionally smiled. He listened to me, he was always present and I sensed I wanted to know him, but my mind was too involved in my own dramatic eclipse to notice more than he was present.

Then he kissed my shoulder, “Just checking” he said. Just checking to see if I was interested, to see if I was human, to see if I was aware of this wonderful man who had notice me in the midst of my madness?  Just checking to see if I was alive or dead, crazy or sane? He took me to dinner, we sat, we smiled, we talked and then my conscious mind intruded with lists of his obvious faults, suggestions he was probably married, on drugs, running from the law or a rampant alcoholic. The entire episode took place in twenty minutes, in my mind, in the middle of a dream. The perfect man was a dream. The one moment of happiness I had experience in 15 years and my conscious had to get in the way. Devastation doesn’t begin to describe my emotional state.

I have always had the ability to change my dreams. I have the ability to reach in with my conscious mind and change the direction of my dreams to make them less frightening and more human. It started as a young child when my nightmares would become so chaotic I feared to sleep. I developed my ability to come out of a deep-sleep and “change” the direction of my dreams, make them more realistic and less frightening. I would become present in them, talking to my dreaming self with reassurances. Over the years my fears of the boogeyman diminished and were replaced by adult musings. This night I was changing the course of my dream again to make it more realistic, more acceptable, more emotionally tolerant, but ultimately much more frightening. What was the universe telling me when I couldn’t allow myself to dream of love, of being valued, of experiencing even a moment of comfort? My reality had become much more frightening than anything I could dream.

My life was out of control again. I had no job, was facing eviction, my ex had stopped paying child support, college tuition was due, my car was being reposed, I was being sued, the list went on. I was just trying to stay above water. All my energy went into defending myself or preparing to defend myself or attacking first so I wouldn’t have to defend myself. I was 45 lbs. overweight, out of shape, tired, frustrated, angry, and stressed and for the first time in 15 years having a dream that was not chaotic, stressful and frustrating. I spent two hours after waking from the experience trying to fall back asleep and so I could recapture the moment. I told my consciousness to stay out of it, to let me have a moment of joy, but it never happened. Life had intruded again. The experience ultimately gave me hope. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my psyche I needed and knew I deserved happiness. My fantasy man was out there waiting to provide it to me, just as I am, dysfunction and all. So begins my journey to figure out where he is, what he represents and how he will change my life. He may never be more than a character in my dream, but somehow I think in the few moments I spent with him he gave me hope. I feel more courageous, more important and more confident. He may not be real, I may never meet him on the street or dream about him again, but those few moments and his voice in my ear have regenerated me to an extent I never thought imaginable. So I will look at ever face that passes in my waking hours and hope to see his smile, I will lay down every night, close my eyes and hope to see his face, and with this hope, with the wonderment, I will learn that hope is all I need to change the course of my life