Somewhere on the flight home from my recent vacation, I had a thought…

Oh! I didn’t think about dreaming while I was away.

For ten days, it never occurred to me. I didn’t wake in the morning and pause to see what I remembered from my dreams. I didn’t notice my breathing, soften into the space of remembering, or wonder where I’d been in my dreams or what imagery might still be lingering.

I was too ready for the day at hand.

And for a brief moment, sitting there on the flight home, I thought, I may have missed a great opportunity. I could have been dreaming on vacation.

And then another thought came.

Maybe I was.

Somewhere New

Of course, I was dreaming. We dream whether we remember our dreams or not.

And travel changes things. We sleep in different beds, keep different schedules, eat differently and sometimes exhaust ourselves doing all the things we don’t ordinarily do. There are plenty of reasons I may not have remembered much about where my dreams took me while I was away.

But none of that was what caught my attention. What really became present was what had been happening while I was awake.

From the moment I opened my eyes, I was somewhere different. The look, the feel, the scents, the sounds.

Even the bed reminded me of that. It wasn’t my bed at home, and honestly, I didn’t particularly like it. So there wasn’t much lying there in the morning contemplating anything. I could hear our friends up and about and moving around the house. The coffee maker was on and the smell called to me. The pitter patter of friendly dogs tapping across the floors.

I was more like, Ooh, I’m awake now. What’s everybody doing? How did everybody sleep? What are we doing today?

Sometimes we already had plans. We had tickets or somewhere we needed to be at a certain time. Other days began with possibility.

Which restaurant do we want to try today? Are we going to the beach? Are we going to hunt for shark teeth?

What’s over there? What’s inside that shop? What happens if we go this way? Look at all that traffic!

The streets were streets I’d never walked. I was tasting things I hadn’t tasted exactly that way before and turning corners without knowing what would be around them. 

Even the temperature became part of the experience. It was intensely hot while we were there. The buildings looked different. The stores looked different. Beach shops were filled with color patterns and objects I don’t encounter at home.

Everything gave me something new to see.

And every once in a while, the day did something we hadn’t planned at all.

We wandered into a small shop in Surf City. Christopher had his Animal Heroes Sea Turtle books with us, and we had the opportunity to talk to the buyer. He wasn’t sure he wanted to ask about carrying them.

But, I thought, Well, we’re here. I’m going to do it.

So I asked. And his books ended up in the store.

There was something almost dreamlike about that moment. Not because anything strange or mystical happened. It was simply that willingness to think, What’s the harm in asking? We’re here.

When we’re somewhere new, maybe we’re a little more willing to take the turn. Open the door. Ask the question.

We don’t know if we’ll ever stand in exactly that place again.

An Outward Dreamscape

When I thought about those ten days from the airplane, I began to realize that the collection of each day had become its own outward dreamscape.

We would talk about what we might do. Gather ourselves. Make a plan when a plan was needed.

And then we’d go.

We would enter the experience without knowing everything that would happen once we got there.

Vacation and trips are like that. There are new and different landscapes and conversations. Food and smells. Water and heat. Mountains and roads. Shops and streets. People and objects.

We can stand in front of something that has existed for hundreds of years but that we have never seen or stood in front of before. 

We can hunt for shark teeth and shells on a beach when we’ve never looked before.

We can eat a meal with people we’ve known, but haven’t seen in a long time. And later talk about the scallops, the soup, and server’s attentive presence. We notice the atmosphere, the way the place looked, what someone said, what we loved about it and whether we would ever want to go there again.

And while reflecting on all of that, it began to sound very familiar. Because these are the same kinds of things I talk about when I talk about dreams.

What did you see?

What did you feel?

What caught your attention?

What did the place feel like?

What stayed with you afterward?

Except I realized I wasn’t just talking about dreaming anymore. Life had become the dream.

And I was living it.