Do you dream? 

Is it an every night occurrence or is it just occasionally? Do you feel like your dreams are trying to tell you something about your present life, your future, or your past? Do you think your dreams are vision or communication from God? 

I’ve heard very many things about dreams throughout my life. I love to talk about dreams and what people people dream about and what they think they mean. Growing up, my family has always said that if your dreams are in color that they are good dreams, and if they are in black and white, that’s a bad dream. That you should never tell a bad dream before breakfast or it will come true. I believe all of that to be true. I have had many dreams come true and have deja vu often. This is going to sound really crazy to probably most of y’all, but I knew I had cancer before the doctor told me. 

Probably a month or so before I got the news I had to have open heart surgery, I had a dream in black in white. I got a phone call from my doctor telling me I had cancer. It wasn’t specific at all. It was just a general voice and all I heard was, “It’s cancer.” I kept the dream to myself, not telling anyone. A couple of weeks before I found out something was seriously wrong with me, I did tell mom I thought I was sick. I didn’t know why, but I just felt off. She just thought it was because I was working out too much and taking too much protein powder. Isn’t it crazy that I had a dream about having cancer and a couple of months later I was diagnosed with it? I remember after I hung up the wildest feeling of deja vu in full motion. 

Not all dreams that I remember were so traumatic like my cancer diagnosis, though. The most vivid dream I have ever had was probably back in 2004 or 2005. It was several months after my grandfather (Pops) had passed away. Mom and I were staying with my Grandmother (Meme) at the time because we didn’t want her to be lonely. She lives next door, so it wasn’t states away, and her house holds a ton of my childhood memories and the time I spent with Pops. 

Back in the day, my Pops sometimes would pick me up from school if my mom had clients or I didn’t want to sit at her beauty shop. We would go to McDonald’s and get some nuggets and go to the house. He had a leather recliner that he always sat in, and he would always make me take his boots off for him and sit them beside his chair. I would sit in the chair with him and we would watch tv. Well, this specific dream was just that. He picked me up from school. He took me to McDonalds to get some nuggets and we went home. It was crazy because I could actually smell the way his truck smelled– like cigarettes and oil. I could smell the nuggets when they handed them through the window. The dream went on, and when we got home I ate the nuggets and Pops asked me to take his boots off and we watched tv, just like we always did. At that moment, it was so realistic. I could taste the nuggets, smell the leather recliner and the mud on the boots. I could feel the fabric of his overalls and feel the scruff of his hands as he helped up in the chair. I can still hear his laugh as we watched tv. This is really the only way I can remember him. It’s the dream that I hope I never can forget. 

Some people in my family have a strong gift for dreaming, both in color and black and white, too. And I call it a gift because even though we might have those black and white dreams, we learn things about ourselves and what means the most to us. And the dreams that we have in color– those are the ones where we get to see the people we love but who aren’t necessarily with us anymore and get to relive those moments. Whether it’s an echo of a memory, a visit from that person, or a sleeping whisper from God (or probably all three), it’s definitely a gift.

I feel for people who say they can’t dream or that they can’t remember their dreams. Dreams make me feel like a kid again. They take me back to when I was little, playing in a swing set thinking it was a spaceship or boat in the middle of the ocean. I was either flying to the moon or fighting off pirates. I had an imagination that could transfer me to a place where all the cares in the world didn’t matter. Dreaming is like reading a book. Living another person’s life and seeing what it would be like to be a pirate, wizard, dragon slayer, soldier, or a president. A different perspective from what you’re living now. Sometimes we need that in life, because we can’t always afford to go on vacation, so a dream or a book is all we have to get away from a life that is just not all rainbows and kittens at the moment. 

When you can, enjoy your dreams and hold onto the memories that you create or recreate within them. They might not be the best, but they have the potential to teach you a life lesson or letting you know something that you can prepare for. Either way, don’t ignore your dreams, they might save your life.