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I have been avoiding writing about the dream I was having when my alarm clock buzzed me awake this morning.  I so rarely remember any dreams now it is actually unsettling when I DO remember one – or parts of one.

Up until about 15 years ago my night dreams were nearly as important to me as my waking life was.  I am finally beginning to understand how my ‘depression’ manifests itself in altered sleeping and dreaming patterns.  But THIS dream I woke from today — what was it about for me?

At first I wanted to believe that I was dreaming about some ‘dream daughter’ – but, no, I don’t think so.  I was my today-adult self dreaming about my little-girl self.  Only the dream was not that straight forward or that simple.

My adult self was searching for this little girl in my dream.  She had been taken away from her mother when she was a tiny baby and had been raised in a happy family.  When I finally found her she was about five years old.  I was ecstatic.  There were things, all kinds of things that I wanted to show her in the world, that I wanted to share with her.

But she was very connected to ‘these other people’ that were her life.  She was not interested in what I had to tell her.  I tried to show her the fragile wildflowers I had found blooming.  Different plants growing closely next to one another, each with multiple delicate flowers blooming along a gently arching stem.  The little girl paid me no heed.  She was happy being a little girl – with other people – elsewhere.

I wanted to show her something else – but she did not hear me.  She was not listening.  She was not interested.  She had other things that concerned her and off she went in her own direction – a different direction than what I had hoped for.

I looked again above my head – so high I had to bend my neck as far back as I possibly could to see it.  I had thought I would be bringing the little girl back with me, and together we could lay upon the ground and study this magnificent creation.  When I had first recognized what was up so far in the sky above me I thought I was seeing a shape in high sparkling white clouds.  Then I had realized those weren’t clouds above me.  I was looking thousands of feet above my head at the shape of an exquisitely carved totem pole, a monumental creation with great spreading wings — carved into masses of glacial ice that looked like a part of a ceiling to a gigantic cave.

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And my alarm went off.  I had a doctor’s appointment in a nearby town to get my arm remeasured for new lymphedema compression sleeves.  I have since been distracted all day from considering this dream.  But I know.  I do actually know what I KNOW about this dream.  I just don’t know how I feel about what I KNOW.

If I had been taken away from my severely abusive Borderline mother and put into a new world to live a different life – full of love, full of kind people, full of opportunity to TRULY be a safe and securely attached child….  If I had been thus allowed to be a CHILD at all, I would NOW be a different person.

That’s a hard idea to wrap my thoughts and feelings around, and I have never done so before today.  Not really.  Not seriously.  And even today, even given this dream with this indescribably beautiful and sacred  image of the crystalline totem pole carved in ancient ice, that seemed to be lit with a light from within, I do not want to TRULY understand what my heart knows.

Because of the WHOLE experience of my childhood, the way it was with my mother, I became an unusual person in the way I don’t think I ever could have possibly done had I lived a far more comfortable and comforting, safe and trauma- and abuse-free infant-childhood.  I believe I would have been that other-kind-of-changed child, changed from who I AM today, changed from who and how I ACTUALLY grew and developed, changed so that I would not have cared about the beauty in the world the way I DO care.

I would not have been the one to SEE that perfect, immense totem pole carved into the vaulted glacial ceiling of the sky.  I would have been left out of THAT world, as uninterested in it as the little girl was that I searched for, went back for, and found in my dream.

This seems like a long way back around to view myself as who I am today – in a different light, in a dreamy light that doesn’t (yet) meld with or match this world I find I live in today.  I haven’t had a dream for a long, long time that seemed to capture a part of my essence and not quite let go once the daylight and the waking came.

I haven’t learned what I can learn from this dream (yet).  Will I?  Can I?  The image – that profound image haunts me in my mind, like a blessing.

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I know that a good part of where this dream came from is connected to the hours I am still spending doing the fine tuning of my mother’s homesteading letters.  The little girl I was remembers that land of Alaska.  I remember it in the cells of my body.  The majestic beauty of that wilderness formed itself into me AGAINST the violence, the terror, the trauma, the suffering, the insanity and the abuse of my childhood.  That beauty grew BIGGER within me than the abuse did, and it changed me – ALSO – because there was no POSSIBLE way I could come through any part of my infant-childhood being ‘ordinary’.

But in this dream I woke out of this early morning I experienced something so extra-ordinary as a reflection of who I am-how I am in the world that I do not have words for it.  Unless those words are frozen echoes from most ancient times held within the glaciers of this world that are melting, melting, melting – too quickly and too wrongly.

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