Every night, the twins task me with a challenge before they go to sleep - "give us good dreams." The challenge is exactly what it sounds like...I am to come up with a plethora of good thoughts and events (drink) to look forward to, essentially filling their brains with positive energy to chase away the monsters and scary clowns who seem to infiltrate their room each night. It used to be easy. I could rattle off countless possibilities to fill their imaginations - "Tomorrow is pajama day at school!" "Remember how much fun you had finger painting with your friends today?" "Only five more days until we go apple picking!" "Erica's birthday party is on Sunday!" But now? It's more like, "um....rainbows! Unicorns!" "Tomorrow we're going to...have breakfast! And lunch! And dinner!" They're not buying it anymore. They're retaliating, claiming my "good dreams" are boring. "Here's a good dream," I want to say..."you're alive...I managed (drink) to keep you alive another day! Good night!"
Dreams are weird aren't they? Every so often I dream about someone I haven't seen in decades and didn't really know that well. Some random kid from elementary school will just (drink) pop into my dream pole vaulting across my backyard or something. And what about teeth dreams? Or gum dreams? James is one of the few people I've met who, like me, sometimes dream about his teeth falling out or not being able to get huge wods of bubble gum out of his mouth. We must be soul (drink) mates.
Last night, for the first time, Corona Virus found its way into my dreams. I know listening to other peoples' dreams is right up there with listening to a techie explain the bowels of a computer when it comes to boredom, so I'll spare you the blurry details and cut to the chase. In a nutshell, my packages arrived! As you can probably relate, the mail has been way backed up and since we don't venture out much, we have a backlog of items we've ordered but have been indefinitely delayed. As adults, we can handle the (drink) disappointment (although I was pretty immature on the patience front when it came to the arrival of the Vitamix). But for kids, it's a major letdown when the headphones they've ordered because Kaleb stepped on their old ones are lost in the black hole of UPS. I can't even use the arrival of packages as a good dream (drink) anymore because chances are, I'm setting them up for disappointment. Anyway, in my dream, everything that has been "lost" suddenly arrived. it was like Christmas.
That's all I really remember except that in my dream I didn't love the color of the mini spoons I had ordered (the twins are obsessed with eating everything with tiny little coffee spoons which (drink) have gradually been decreasing in number...I can only imagine the crevices in the couch that now house the little utensils). I pretended to like them, though, because I didn't want to wait for a replacement delivery. Strange times. (Drink)
One thing that thankfully did arrive on time was the hinge for our kitchen cabinet. Remember the one I busted in a moment of displaced anger? James finally found the limited edition hinge from somewhere in West Virginia. He ordered four. Just in case.
Delayed deliveries for frivolous purchases are clearly of low importance in the grand scheme of things. But dreams have a way of rehashing those things we push to the back of our brains during the day, reminding us, at night, that we can't repress them. If I really dissect my (drink) dream, it's less about delayed deliveries than a craving for normalcy. It's a message that even at home in my bubble where there are few reminders of the bizarre world we now live in, we are affected. There's no escape. Uplifting isn't it? Sweet dreams!