I keep a small notebook by my bed, jotting down fragments of dreams each morning. I often add little sketches next to my words, tiny visual echoes of the night’s imagery. The dreams are oftentimes strange, sometimes unsettling, but always revealing. I write them in the present tense, stepping back into their unfolding, letting their images and emotions speak before memory fades. And honestly—it’s incredible how much we can integrate and better understand ourselves through dreams!
Some of the scenes take me back to old classrooms and hallways—places that shaped the rhythms of who I am. The high school represents the self I was learning to form, the social currents and ambitions of adolescence. The elementary school carries the foundations beneath it all: early structures, lessons, and patterns that quietly echo into who I am today.
This dream is from January, but its light feels new each time I revisit it. The brightest fragment: a lipstick-shaped lamp, kitsch and mischievous, glowing as though it knows secrets I have only just begun to understand.
THE DREAM:
I walk past my old high school house. The owner and his wife host a barbecue. He looks younger, sturdier, almost unrecognizable. He offers a tour. I know it is not the right moment, yet I follow, stepping into rooms I have never seen—spaces larger than memory, quietly waiting for me to explore, to inhabit, to recognize beauty in forms I had overlooked.
Later, in the St. Mary Elementary School gym, two childhood friends sit with me as we shuffle chairs, preparing for mass. Another student arranges the altar in black lingerie, effortlessly drawing attention. I feel jealousy, restlessness, the familiar ache of comparison—but the lipstick lamp calls me differently: mischief, curiosity, delight.
TAKEAWAY: Beauty reveals itself not as a prize or a measure, but as a living, playful space—one that expands as I expand, quietly teaching me to move through life with joy, wonder, and the courage to claim what is mine to see.