Making Marks by Elaine Clayton

Author:Elaine Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books / Beyond Words

The Power of Dreams

Dreams have the power to send very big messages, even if we don’t understand them right away. Most people remember at least one influential dream they’ve had—maybe from childhood, maybe a scary or bad one. I remember a bad dream that was a turning point for me. At a very young age, I had a tremendously disturbing dream about my parents. It shattered me. When I woke up, my parents were entertaining friends after dinner. I could not go back to sleep or stay in bed, so I tiptoed out into the den. My dad was making drinks called “grasshoppers,” rich green with foamy cream on top. (This was the 1960s. My parents were still relatively young, and this drink was kind of a fad at the time.) I stood beside my dad as he stirred the drinks, feeling terrible dread about my dream. He asked me what I was doing up. With a panicked feeling, I told him, “I had a bad dream.” He was easygoing with me and asked me about my dream. I could not imagine telling—I thought that since it was a bad dream about him, I’d be at fault for having it.

I told him I was afraid I’d get in trouble if he knew about my dream. He said, “No, you won’t. Of course not.” His kind and gentle manner was a good thing at that moment. I will never forget the tremendous wave of heaviness, fear, and horror that welled up in me as I blurted out the dream. It was taking a real risk! After I almost exploded with fear—both in the dream and while retelling it—my dad reacted in a way that opened a new understanding for me about the power of dreams.

My dad’s reaction was sudden and spontaneous: he found humor in it! What a surprise and a relief. I wasn’t in trouble at all. At that moment, I realized something that has served me my entire life: dreams do not have to “own” us, no matter how big their impact is on the dreamer or how real they seem. Dreams cannot be denied, but they are not something that should destroy us or keep us stuck in fear. They are not something we can be blamed for having, either.

In my child-mind, I thought I could be blamed for my dream, but when I realized that dreams are subject to our assessment of them, it lost its power to horrify me. Suddenly, my nightmare became “only a dream.” In a gentle way, my dad showed me how dreams work and gave me a way to cope with them. From then on, I could first feel their impact, then decide what I made of them afterward.

This was empowering—a little bit like being a film critic watching a movie made just for me. I continued to have cinematic, impressive dreams, but they never ruled me completely again. Instead, they showed me the fears and troubles I had not surmounted yet. Dreams served me content on a silver platter.

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