Image by Midjourney
DREAM
I'm heading into a store. Times are kind of rough in the world. So going into this store feels luxurious, even though it's just a large chain store with that same underlying warehouse feel that chain stores have. There are at least expensive items for anyone to look at and touch, even if they can't afford to buy them.
I see a display, and I pick up a book about plants and cooking from a small stack of them. I know this is a hot book right now, and I don't think everyone here in this store appreciates what a catch it is. I think rather smugly to myself, The fools! There's no malice in this feeling though. I'd just like to show other people what they're missing. I'm excited. I try to start up a conversation with someone else at the display, but the conversation doesn't go anywhere.
Then I realize I might have made a mistake. This is last month's hottest new book. Maybe that book over there is this month's. I stop my hubris and take the time to actually check the dates much more carefully. Maybe buying this book isn't as great an idea as I thought it was just a couple of seconds ago.
I wander out of the store into the mall that it's a part of. I bump into someone who I know is an indie filmmaker. We chat for a little bit. He's filming something today on the upper levels. Then I bump into a group of people from my youth group. We exchange a quick, "Hi," but I notice where they're heading, and I notice that they didn't invite me to join in the fun on the film crew. I'm hurt.
INTERPRETATION
That pain of being left out is very old, and very familiar. I used to feel left out of my youth group very often when I was a preteen.
I have been going through something for the past three weeks. Every morning, I wake up to painful feelings in my stomach and a tumble of negative thoughts reminding me of my past mistakes and regrets. Or maybe the negative thoughts are repeatedly telling me that my future is going to be a catastrophe. Or they just tell me that I'm a really bad person. I'm just in a lot of pain these days. I didn't have a relationship go bad. I'm not sick. I'm doing things I would ordinarily like. Nothing significant is going wrong in my life. Yet I'm in the grip of something very dark. So I'm not surprised that these old, painful feelings are being thrown back up in my face in a dream.
What's more of a mystery to me is the first part of the dream. Could that just be how I always feel like I need to check things a second time? I have been reading code documentation for a library I am not familiar with, so I've definitely had to go over things multiple times recently, checking and rechecking my assumptions. I've also been considering how everyone has a reason for the hurtful things they do. And maybe it's worth trying to go back over those memories to figure it out. If you really understood where they were coming from, wouldn't that lessen the amount of hurt you feel?
