I used to bite my nails terribly. Now I’ve limited it to one sad thumb. It’s an outlet, it helps me keep my stress down. When I was younger, my parents thought they would try to help me to break the habit by taking me to a hypnotist. I want to point out that although I agreed to go, I wasn’t independently self conscious from having bitten nails or aware that biting your nails was a problem per se. All of my apprehension about it came from the comments of others. **Note to self, my kids are perfectly fine just the way they are no matter what their habits, and making them feel badly about themselves will NOT make them stop.** ANYHOW…. I was hypnotized a few times, and I came home with a series of self hypnosis tapes to listen to between sessions. I remember that when I came home from the first session I sat on the couch and bit my nails in a trance until my brother clapped his hands in front of my face. Notice I didn’t say that hypnosis worked.

I very rarely dream since.

But this morning I had a dream!!! It felt very short, but I’ll tell you because it’s big news around here! In it, I was visiting a cousin’s weird house, and they lived near my grandfather. There were strange elements like a dog sitter who sat on the back deck of her house with the dog, and fireworks, and crowds inside the house for no reason as if I was at a concert. My cousin had a husband I didn’t recognize, and a baby child that doesn’t exist in real life, and her dog was actually my mom’s, somehow. I left the crazy, crowded house (and told the dog sitter that my cousin was home on my way out, btw, because she was hiding from him in plain sight behind glass…. go figure), and went to see my grandfather. My kids stayed back, but I brought pictures of them to show off. In the pictures, my kids were older, my son was probably 17 rather than his current 12. Grandpa talked about how tall A was in the pictures and I said that I wished he would come to see me and meet the kids again. Then he gave me a big, long, tight hug and PROMISED (for real this time) that he would come to Chicago to see us. I don’t know if I believed him in my dream, because he never visited Illinois, but for those 30 seconds or so while he was hugging me in my dream it felt like heaven, and I was so happy to see him because he lived very far away.

When I woke up, my first thought was that THIS time I was going to hold him to it, and if he wouldn’t come see us, I would just take the kids down to see him. No more wasted time worrying about who was going to visit who, because it was always me anyhow, and who really cares, right? I told A, who had just come home from a sleep-over, that I had been dreaming about Grandpa Babe. Before I could tell him about the plans and details, I realized suddenly that Grandpa Babe had passed away about ten years ago. So that visit in my dreams, and most especially that hug, is about as good as it is going to get. He never had a chance to meet CC and there are no future visits to look forward to, unfortunately. And yeah, it sucks not dreaming. But in all seriousness, I would give up a lifetime of dreams about ridiculous things for the occasional dream so vivid that it brings someone back to life, even in waking! I will SOOOO take it, even if it is only for a couple of minutes and it hurts really, really bad.