February 18, 2011 – Sirach 34

I don’t know what to make of dreams.  I often don’t remember dreams and usually the ones I do aren’t good dreams but the ones you tried to wake up from.  Really the only time I really remember freaking out about a dream is when Paul was about 3-5 months old and for about a week I woke up several times knowing for certain that Paul was being smothered in our blankets.  I would wake up frantically trying to get to him and looking for him in all the blankets.  It might be the most scared I have been, yet Paul never slept in our bed.  It was completely in my head.  But many people take dreams very seriously and in the day of psychiatrist and the like, we are told that our dreams say a lot about us.  Here we are told that only fools are guided by their dreams.  They are formed by us, they display what we either want or fear, but come from us internally.  There was a time when I read some books about trying to control your dreams.  The idea was that eventually you could be active in your dreams.  You would be able to take things that you might be working on in real life, do them in your dream to see what the result would be, and use that knowledge when you woke up.  But isn’t that all limited to what your own mind contains.  Everything in your dream is limited to your knowledge.  It doesn’t take into account everyone else’s thoughts and actions and other possibilities.  Needless to say I didn’t get far because the first step is to remember your dreams, and I just have never been able to do that.  It just appears that at the present time people make a big deal about dreams and I just don’t have any feeling that a dream has ever helped me do anything.  They just don’t seem like something that is very important to me.