I’ve had vivid dreams as long as I can remember.

Vivid.

A few years ago, they came back with an unearthly force, and to be honest I can only attribute some of the bizarre dream experiences as some kind of spiritual…something.  I would dream of people I was deeply connected to, and they would feel so real.  I would wake, smelling something from the dream, or feeling the presence of a person.  I would wake and remember the dream later as a memory, not as a dream, until it would hit me that I had, in fact, dreamed the whole story.

Like I said, bizarre.  Still with me?

During the time the dreams came back to me, I began to remember my first moments with them.

When I was a little girl, I would dream I was at my grandmother’s house (the same grandmother I would dream of so often when I was in the worst of my numbing).  In the dream, I am in the kitchen, the roosters on the walls happy and her.  I walk up the carpeted stairs and walk towards “my room” in her house.  I come to the door, and turn the knob, cautiously.  I can feel just how cold it is to the touch, and I’m anxious, excited, hopeful.  I know something is waiting for me.

The door opens and there, in my room, is a sky filled with clouds.  Before I can help it, a huge smile spreads across my face, and I step carefully onto the first cloud and then hop to another.  I dance and jump from cloud to cloud, filled with joy and peace and dare I say it, heaven.

There is no ending to the dream, but eventually, I wake.

I dreamed this cloud dream of mine over and over throughout my childhood.  I believed deep in my soul the place in the clouds was real, and I did visit there from time to time.

I cannot say now what exactly I believe about the place in the clouds, but there is a huge part of me that believes in its realness.  Maybe I didn’t actually step from cloud to cloud, but maybe the place in the clouds is real in my soul and maybe it was there then to teach me what I held within me, and what would remain.

Maybe our dreams are teachers when we allow them to be.

Maybe my head was never in the clouds, but my heart was.  Maybe the belief in all of the unknowns is exactly what I needed then, as I needed it when life went bananas.  As I do now.

Maybe the place in the clouds led me to write, to imagine, and now, to paint magical lands that come from only my head.  And maybe, they’re not coming from my head at all.  Maybe they are coming from my soul.

And I do know this:  I’ve learned to listen to her.