influencing one another

I’ve never co-dreamed with anyone. None of my sleeping partners have ever awoken to the same dream I’d just had, nor I theirs. I’ve heard of such things happening. Two of my friends each told me stories of sharing the same dream with someone before. One was a skeptic. Their partners had been/were lovers of theirs.

But on my New York trip last weekend, I experienced the closest thing I came to co-dreaming. I didn’t realize until later, of course. I’d been disturbed by the dream, and at the first chance I had, shared it with my ex-boyfriend, who was the main character in the dream.

“You were in a dream of mine,” I said. “I’d run into you somewhere and was trying to make a date with you so we could hang out, but you were kind of evasive,” I said. I proceeded to tell him what I could remember without my notes:

There was a blonde woman there beside him named Cornelia DeGray. After a while, I figured out they were dating. They left the room together. He stuck out his tongue at me as they exited the room. I was shocked, but quickly recovered. I ran after the two of them. She sat in the car while he spoke with me in the parking lot.

“Why didn’t you just tell me,” I asked him. “You didn’t have to stick your tongue out at me. That hurt, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“That really hurt.”

“I’m sorry.”

It was my last morning in New York. I’d sent E-mail dispatches to my friends back home about my trip. The sun promised a clear day of driving ahead. The birds trilled happily in the trees outside the window. I woke up profoundly sad.

“When did you have that dream,” my ex asked.

“On Monday night. I woke up to it Tuesday morning.”

“I went to bed mad at you that night,” he said. We were on his couch after dinner, trying to finish the last of the wine in the bottle he’d gotten from the 7-11 across the street. “I was hurt by the E-mails you sent,” he said.

“I was really sad about it,” I said. “I didn’t realize how much it hurt me until I was thinking about it on my way home, and I started crying about it.”

“You sounded like you were having so much fun,” he’d said. “I felt left out of your life. I was mad about that”

It is conversations like this that are healing, that keep us close friends. It is instances like this that affirm my belief that we are all connected. That love is boundless and it travels across the seas and we feel the affects of one another’s negative and positive emotions all the time.

How many times have I gone to bed angry with someone, frustrated, disappointed, or sad? How many disturbing dreams have my feelings influenced? Until now, these questions never existed.

All of you: there is so much depravity in this world already, so much cause for anxiety and fear. Let us try entering sleep with sound minds and hearts so that all of us—if for just a moment—can enjoy peace, love and kindness between ourselves.