The rain water had collected at the bottom of the Interstate highway ramp.  Ahead,  the ramp rose to a steep incline and I could see the large, green sign indicating the connector to Van Wert, Ohio.  I pushed down on the car’s accelerator and found myself on the other end of the water, rising with the road.  To my left near the guard rail one thin, grey haired man looked distraught while another  faceless individual berated him. “You should not do this,” was the lectures as the faceless person broke red dishes over the guard rail.

I awoke from my dream and lectured myself.  Why would I drive though a flooded road?  My car could stall.  I should know better.  Why would I have done so in my dream?  Yet, in my dream, I made it.  Bladder bursting, I stumbled out of bed thoughts still racing.

I found myself in nice a new house with a beautiful interior.  Walking in, the windows on the back of the house looked over a pool.  Many people were in the pool, splashing, partying.   I walked to the back to meet everyone.   No bladder issue there.  The dead of winter was getting to me, I surmised, and fell back into a deep sleep.

The fact that I was dreaming of water, however, brought back a theme of past dreams.  Years ago, I had dreamt repeatedly of a  great wave.  The timing of the dreams preceded the destructive tsunamis so they could not have been attributed to world events I had been following.  The dreams were just simply of  a great wave that stopped just before the reaching  my front door.  The enormous wave  was never near enough to harm me yet, through my window, I could see the water’s edge at my front lawn.   In my conscious existence, my job at the time was in jeopardy – again.  My industry was on a slow spiral and the local economy seemed unpredictable.   I worried about my company moving half way around the world, of being unemployed, of the future.  The dreams vex me while seemed to be telling me that something was coming but I would be safe.  Months went by and I found myself safely employed at a different firm while others I knew were out of work.  The dreams of the wave not return.

These recent water dreams  made me wonder.  The water seemed to return in a different form.    Another job scare was beginning for everyone in my company.  Days after my dream, I came across the word “severance” carelessly scrawled in, of all things,  red ink across the back of my boss’s notes I was given to copy.  Could my dreams once again be telling me something?  Perhaps forging ahead.  Take the high road.  Perhaps don’t think about the issue in front of me.  All of it seems unavoidable much like the water over the road when I really need to get somewhere.

Maybe a more deeper, more mysterious, issue lingers in my dream world.  I don’t even live in Ohio.  Maybe I just need a vacation, or a summer vacation house with a pool.  In Van Wert.

Sitting in the hairdresser’s chair may not have been the first place to decide to blog but it pretty much defined the need.  The discussion eventually drifted from the length of my hair to reality verses aspirations.  Confessing that I really don’t spend a great deal of time on my hair, that I was a rather messy person, that I admittedly day dreamed had lead my hair dresser into pointing out that creativity comes from messy people.  Further psychoanalysis, as well as the need to dry my hair front to back, pinpointed that my life’s choices had been mixed together.  She speculated that they were defining my soul’s need. That the culmination of a person’s dreams point to a need to be somehow satisfied.  I speculated aloud that dreams, or ingredients, made up a big dish of mish mash – or, as I put it, a Dream Casserole.  The name sparked a laugh from my hair dresser and it stuck.

So, how can a meassy day dreaming individual move past dreaming into action?  Does a person need to dream big in order to be self actualized or does dreaming simply help with coping?   Even more mystifying, what are other people’s dreams and how does it impact their daily lives?

Day dreaming must be a way of coping with dull realities, of being in a place that  deserves to be ignored to focus on more pressing ideas, places, situations.  It is the mind waking up in its own territory to define thoughts.  And day dreams are just during the day.  Stranger still are the dreams at night.  Such as my previous night’s dream of Bob Eubanks and three women dressed in canary yellow contemplating how to get the gold thread to weave through their TV costumes for the next show.  Not certain dreams ultimately help put together life’s direction but maybe something is being said.  Perhaps limiting games shows was my mind’s advice? Not certain.  

Interpreting dreams can be nutty business.  Life can drive everyone into odd directions.  But maybe hopes and aspirations manifested in dreams are all just part of who we are and what we need to examine.  Perhaps a casserole isn’t exactly the best term to describe our dreams but perhaps it will describe our need for a good serving of our own imaginings.