Image by Midjourney
DREAM
I am a new hire at a fast food restaurant.
Someone who hurt me very badly who I'd grown up with is my boss.
He has me do several tasks, and even though we are both polite to each other, I am wildly uncomfortable being around him.
Then I get in a car with my mother, and she starts driving erratically. She runs over a little toddler who had exited the family van and was standing in the turn lane. I scream, horrified.
We look around town, and I wonder if I would live here.
Then we park, and I realize she has dementia.
The mother of the girl we ran over followed us. She comes up to my window. I'm terrified. In an effort to explain ourselves, I say, "She has dementia!" To my surprise and relief, the woman seems to understand and forgive us. She walks away.
I don't know what to do about my mom's dementia, but I know she can't keep driving.
INTERPRETATION
I am doing a lot of guided lovingkindness meditation along to videos on YouTube. Lovingkindness meditation is a type of Buddhist meditation in which you try to expand your circle of compassion and love to encircle all beings.
All. That's a very tall order for me, and I think I'm not alone in that. But recently, I will think about people who have hurt me very badly in the past, and I will either put them out of my mind for a while during meditation, or if I feel up to it, I will try to include them in my circle of compassion.
It's hard for me to accept the fact that people do vile things, while wishing them well at the same time. I asked ChatGPT about this, and it gave a stellar answer. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted that answer. I thought I could always get the same response again, so I didn't copy it elsewhere, but it's different now. Oh well.
What I really took away from the chatbot's answer was that lovingkindness meditation implies that love has transformative powers--even if it's just love cultivated in your own heart. Eventually, that love you carry with you shows up in the wider world. And it can do you good to have faith that people can change. The answer also encouraged moving beyond the shallowness of judgements warped with one's own pain to trying to view hurtful actions as a result of suffering in a vast, interconnected system of life.
So I think that's why I'm dreaming about someone who hurt me. I'm trying to have more compassion. But I still don't know exactly how to handle feelings of resentment that keep cropping up now and then.
I am, however, incredibly thankful for grace for my own messes, as symbolized by the mother who forgave us for running over her child.
And I am trying to figure out how to be wise when dealing with people--harmful people, too.
I'm also scared of dementia. I know so many people's parents who have dementia at this point. It's always sad.
