Dreams and Wishes

I was watching Cinderella with my little girl over this past weekend—after a brief tantrum in the kitchen because she said she wanted a snack and when she said “Relly,” I thought she meant celery. Ooops. Turns out she wanted to eat yogurt and watch Cinderella.

Anyway, you know how right at the beginning, there’s that whole little dance and song about how “A dream is a wish your heart makes/When you’re fast asleep.” Do you think that’s true? Sometimes I wonder. See, I have some crazy dreams that in no way would I want to come true. But others…others make me long for a different kind of reality.

Ice skating. I think my heart is telling me I should have been an ice skater. Several times every month, I have vivid dreams about ice skating. Sometimes it’s a very involved dream, with different people and places and events, but it always ends the same. I’m gliding over the ice, graceful, swan-like, elegant, impervious to everything around me. And then I start to spin, slowly at first, my arms up over my head, my skates barely touching the ice, then faster, faster until everything around me is a blur and momentum gradually pulls my arms down and I’m lost in a sea of white silence. Then, the music I’m skating to suddenly stops and I throw my arms out and take a bow to an audience that’s not there.

Odd. And yet, if I look deeper into it, maybe my heart isn’t telling me that I should have been an ice skater. Maybe the wish my heart is making while I’m fast asleep is that I wish my life wasn’t spinning in a million different directions. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I look forward to that dream because I always wake up feeling a little happier than I did when I went to bed. And that’s a good thing.

Now I need to think about the dreams I have of becoming a Rockette…