Moonshadow Revelations - Kayjee

[Kayjee]

This is the beginning of my lucid dreaming journal. I guess I will start with the one lucid dream I will remember in vivid detail for the rest of my life. A little background is required, so here it is: My father died of lukemia when I was 24 (I'm 42 now). He and I never had an easy relationship because we were very dissimmilar personalities, and when he died we were having major disagreements about how I was living my life. He was in the hospital for a month, but I only visited him twice - and the second time he was unconscious. So, inevitibly I had felt guilty about our unresolved differences since the day he died. Background finished - now on to the dream... I was walking down a hallway made of incredibly beautiful marble threaded through with every color you could imagine. I reached a living room type space that was also marble, but had comfortable chairs and couches scattered around. I barely had time to look around when I realized that someone was behind me, and when I turned around I saw my father. Instead of looking ill and wasted as he had before he died, he looked very much younger and healthy - a lot like I remember him from when I was a small child. He was wearing a white shirt and blue pants, and he had on what he called his "boat shoes". He told me that he knew I had desperately wanted to be able to talk to him, and that is why he was there. He took me by the hand and we sat on a couch facing each other. I started to speak, but he held up his hand and asked me to let him talk first. His voice was filled with sorrow and regret when he said, "I'm sorry that I never let you cry on my shoulder. I never knew that having me there to just listen to you when you were upset and crying was so very important. And I just want you to know that I am here for you to cry on any time that you need to." Well, as you can imagine, that is exactly what I did in my dream. (When I woke up, I still had tears on my face.) As I cried, my Dad just cuddled me up in his arms and did his best to explain to me that, growing up as the youngest of 7 kids being raised by his mother, he didn't know how to raise a little girl. When I was a baby and a toddler he was away most of the time fighting in the Vietnam war, and when he came home I would cry or run away because I didn't know who he was. As I got older, I always preferred fantasy to reality - and I was always very emotional; and he explained that he didn't know how to handle that. He was very much a person who lived in reality (in fact, he called fiction books "lies" because they weren't about true things). He told me that he was afraid that I wouldn't be able to take care of myself in the real world, and that was why he hounded me about living my life in a fantasy world. At that point I interrupted him and said, "You were right about that, though. Reality has always been hard for me, but because of the things you taught me I have been able to take care of the required reality and keep my sanity-saving fantasy life seperated enough to survive". That made him break out into that wonderful smile of his that lit up his face. Finally, he gently dried my tears with his big, slightly calloused hands, and told me that our time to talk was almost up, and there was one more very important thing he needed me to know. (Whenever I remember this part it still makes me cry) "DON'T feel guilty about the things that happened when I died. I know now, as I knew then, that you love me and you always will - and nothing else matters beyond that knowledge. Everything happens for a reason, and there will come a time when your experiences with the pain, guilt, and heartache will help the people you love from making similar mistakes and having to walk down that road. Use your writing talent to tell the story - no matter how many tears you have to cry while you're doing it. Always remember that I'm watching over you, and even though the path you've chosen isn't the one your mother and I dreamed for you, I'm so very proud of you." Then the dream was over. I sat up in bed and wiped away the tears on my face, realizing that for the first time since his death - my heart was warm and at peace when I thought of him. This is the lucid dream I will never forget, and the one I'm doing my best at this point to write for the benefit of several of my nieces and nephews who are, as my father predicted, in similar situations with their parents. So, the next lucid dream I have will be my next entry.