What Dreams May Be
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
I’ve noticed a peculiar phenomenon when I wake up now days. For a moment time fades and five- or ten-seconds pass as I imagine I’m a still child in my parents’ home again. Then I come to full consciousness and realize how many years it has been since those good days of my youth. I’ve always been a vivid dreamer. When I was a teenager in the sixties, dream studies were all the rage, and I was fascinated by them. By then my dad had finished his PhD in psychology, and I remember pestering him about the meaning of my dreams–giving him long complex descriptions of what I had dreamed the night before. He was unsatisfactorily non-forthcoming. He’d grin and assure me he had no idea what one dream or the next meant.
The only time I can remember him actually commenting on the possible interpretation of a dream was when I had been married about 20 years and had several kids. I’d had an unusually disturbing dream in which I was locked in an exit-free tower with 360-degree windows. All around me I could see my adult women friends floating in the air, laughing and calling me to come out and fly with them. But the windows were secured. There was no escape.
My dad listened carefully. Even over the phone I could hear him raise one eyebrow—his signal for dubious authenticity. “Well,’ he said. “Just because Freud thought dreams were an indication of what was going on in your unconscious mind doesn’t mean that anyone can accurately identify what’s happening in the brain. But that particular dream? No too hard to guess that you feel trapped. Maybe you should do something about that.” Great. Just what I needed. Confirmation that my life was in the pits.
Most of my dreams are ephemeral wisps which disappear once I am fully awake. But I’ve often wondered about the numerous stories dotting the scriptures where dreams are messages from Heaven? In the back of my mind I’ve always worried that someday, if I didn’t pay attention, I might miss something important. I can’t be absolutely certain, but maybe I was right.
For at least ten years before I started teaching, my own family had a tradition of holding an open house the week before Christmas for all our neighbors—mostly because I was too disorganized to make and deliver small gifts or treats to them on an individual basis. So we bought routinely 25 or 30 cans of refrigerated baking powder biscuits (the cheapest variety turned out to work the best!), and we made donuts. It’s easy. Just poke a hole in each biscuit; stretch it a little to form it into a donut shape, drop it in hot grease for a minute, flip it, and then cool the result on a layer of paper towels or old newspapers—if there is still such a thing in your area.
Our guests could then roll the steaming donuts in their choice of granulated sugar or homemade maple or chocolate frosting. Instant yummy! We averaged between a hundred and two hundred neighbors streaming through. So when I started teaching, I decided to celebrate the season making donuts for my students on the A and B days before Christmas break.
To say my donuts were very popular was an understatement. I told students (and faculty) they could have as many as they wanted (refrigerated biscuits are still some of the cheapest bread products on the market), but if they ate so many they threw-up in my classroom, I’d lower their grades. Students were always vying to challenge the record for the most hot donuts eaten in a single class period. One year a kid downed 22. Of course, ingesting all that fried oil made him sick, so to save his grade, he raced out of my room, tore down the stairs to the choir room (who knows why he picked that?), and threw-up there. As you can imagine, for a while my relationship with the choir teacher was somewhat strained.
Then one year, early in December, I had a dream. In my dream it was Donut Day in my classroom. As always, I had built a border of desks around where I was cooking, but in the dream a scuffle broke out. One boy shoved another who slammed into a girl standing near my makeshift perimeter of desks, and the concussion splashed a wave of scalding hot oil onto her arm. Instantly, I woke out of my sound sleep, gasping for breath. I never cooked donuts for my classes again.
Was my dream a view of the future? I’m a believer, so the answer was pretty clear to me. For non-believers, maybe it was just a dream. On the other hand, over the 15 or more Christmases when I cooked donuts for hundreds, perhaps thousands of my students before the dream of that night, not a single student had ever breached my Donut Day safety rules. That horrifying vision in my sleep was enough to convince me to pay attention to my dreams. Just in case.