Respecting Your Dreams

Fears about aging that show up at night

What a dream I had last night. It was a spectacle of circus animals walking in water, a griffin flying overhead, and cows who seemed to understand they were headed for water deeper than they could navigate. It was by examining the cows that I came to understand what this dream was really about: aging.

Photo by Ed Wingate on Unsplash

Aging is a change you can’t control, and it feels like entering water that might be over your head.

I viewed this circus show from another familiar and recurring site in my dreams: a bridge. That, too, comes with obvious symbolism. In this case, it was a familiar bridge that connects where I used to live to where I’ve moved today. It spans old and new parts of my life, and sometimes I’m crossing the bridge in different directions depending on my dream’s perspective. Do I want to go back? Am I still trying to reach the new side? But bridges, too, embody the symbol of aging from our young familiar selves to this new and foreign body.

We need a soft transition from who we were to who we’re becoming.

Usually, we experience a little cringe at the word aging, particularly in an agist society. But it’s also interesting and fascinating to me, like watching the development of characters in a favorite show or book. All it really means is we are changing. And while we’ve always been changing, it becomes different past a certain age because, while you still recognize your familiar traits, joys, and annoyances, a whole new load of events arrives that you must learn how to navigate while continuing to juggle the familiar old stuff.

I still get annoyed by people doing dumb things or using manipulative behaviors. But I also have to lean in closer to make sure I’m understanding correctly, and balance the ongoing argument in my head: “Should I let this slide, or should I be truthful in hopes of a deeper understanding, even if it risks a more dramatic encounter?” It’s a combination of thoughts and feelings that haven’t entirely changed from my youth but are rather compounded with the new insights of maturity and diminished tolerance.

Aging is the Ph.D. process of our life experience.

Aging is also tied to the inevitable other end. Death. The better we get at understanding life, even while learning our changing emotional and physical needs, the nearer we get to the end of it all. Nearing the years of our end also dulls some of the importance of our troubles. When we give up on trying to clarify challenging relationships, we also shy away from people more. Sometimes it’s easier to avoid than engage. That brings gains in peace but loss of connection.

Like everything in life, we have to find our balance, even while that balance is constantly shifting.

If we’re lucky, we dream. We remember these dreams and examine them. I can’t recall when the bridge dreams started for me but my earliest memory of one was about thirty years ago. Death is a bridge too, we just don’t know what’s beyond it. Even though both sides of a bridge belong to entirely different places, the bridge itself is a part of them both. We are still us even though we’re changing, and our transitions are a comfort along the way. Dreams help bring our attention to our fears and the profound experiences we so often normalize and try to avoid.

One of the dreams I first recorded was during my high school years. Our creative writing teacher asked us to write down and bring a dream into class. My dream was mostly about my high school boyfriend and all the large important fears of a teenaged girl. Those same fears would not show up in a dream today because they don’t exist. Boys don’t scare me anymore. When I see twenty and thirty-something young women agonizing over men, I want to tell them to just hang on and wait. Men won’t seem like the complex foreigners they are today; they’ll just become people with different body parts and wardrobes. Life is like this in so many ways. The big complex problems we once struggled with have resolved somehow, and now we dip into new pools of worries and situations. Or we learn to loosen the hold of our thoughts so we live in a more peaceful place entirely.

Photo by Asap PANG on Unsplash

I haven’t figured out aging. I like to think I’m a baby at this process with a long way to go. But we are all stepping onto a bridge that reaches toward the end of our mortality. And when we get there, I’m picturing a dream state filled with beauty and peace and newness. Because there is always the chance that we’re designing this life and possible afterlife as we go. Make it good.

Thanks for exploring this mortal life with me. See you next week. Dream well and don’t be afraid to look.