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I know someone who is now leaving a 20-year relationship with an alcoholic who has made past attempts at sobriety but who is not ‘cutting the mustard’ — and probably never will.  Hearing about this last night no doubt stimulated the dream I remembered when I awoke this morning.

Dreaming about a house often means this symbol is reflecting one’s life — or life in general as it might apply to somebody else.  I recognized even as I woke up in my dream as I was having it last night what was going on.  The house I dreamt was massive.  As such dream houses can be, it was filled with twists and turns, nooks and crannies, room after room after room.  I was responsible for the whole thing.  Which was fine, as the house reflected my life as I might generalize it to somebody else’s.

All fine and good, but everywhere I went in the dream there was a mess.  Flooded rooms, piles of broken objects, rooms full of useless junk — mess after mess after mess.  And there I was spending my entire dream time cleaning messes up.  Until it dawned on me NOT ONE of these messes was mine.  I had not made one of them.  They ALL belonged to somebody else.

That’s when dawn awakened me in my dream in a stroke of insight.  “What am I doing here?  Why do I let these people into my house (life)?  Why am I spending my time cleaning all these messes up when I have NOTHING to do with making them?”

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So I quit.  I quit cleaning up — and immediately quit dreaming!

As soon as I woke up in real time I knew what had triggered this dream.  I knew the actions this person I heard about is taking are designed to free her life of someone else’s messes.  Clear as day.

I also recognized that now that I am 60 I do not have those kinds of messes anywhere in my life, nor will I let them in.  They will not accumulate.  I am not trapped by them in any way.  What a good sense of freedom I have this morning, of being proud of myself considering my traumatic past that I was able to walk into this life I have today — one that is not all cleaned up!  It is clean because I let nobody into my life that can mess mine up in the first place!

Who wants to live their life being a slave to someone else’s trauma drama?  True, my life is not perfect if perfect is measured by material success or even perfect physical health.  True, I suffer from consequences in my physical body that are the direct result of forming my body in the first place for the first 18 years of my life in conditions of a holocaust.

True, there have been times in my life long ago when I didn’t know any better.  I had to follow my instincts to always move forward in my life toward growth and healing so that I could walk my way out of my own messes.  Those times were hard.  They were fraught with emotional chaos.  I could see nothing clearly.  But eventually I found my way increasingly out of the darkness I was born into — that was so dark I had no idea such a thing as light even existed — into the life I live today that is free from every mess except the one piled up in one of my closets.

And even that mess, I realized yesterday in conversation with a friend, is a reflection of something good.  It is there because I am going into my 6th year of living in this house.  Moving continually has never let me keep anything anywhere I have lived in one place long enough for it to need to be cleaned in its own right.  It is a GOOD thing I have a messy closet!

Albeit I am afraid of the Brown Recluse spider in Arizona that thrives in any undisturbed place — and is a TERRIBLY dangerous creature.  I am afraid to clean the depths of my closet.  But that fear is a real one — and the mess in that closet is a legitimate one.  And it is MY mess, and my mess only!  I made it all by myself, and however I end up cleaning it up — I will do that all by myself, as well.

And it is for SURE that I will find NO skeletons in any closet of mine.

Clarity is a precious commodity!

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