Last night I dreamed I was at Richard’s mother’s house watching old videotapes from when I was a little girl. The videotape I was watching was of when I was a little girl at summer camp. In the video, I was on a boat, going down a river, videotaping the boys’ side of the camp (ah, ask my mother about the stress I caused her in those years!). In one scene in the video, I zoomed in on one boy who was sleeping peacefully in his bunk. And, that little boy was Richard! I was shocked and jumped up (in my dream), yelling for Richard to come into his mom’s living room so I could show him that we had actually attended summer camp at the same time when we were quite young.

When Richard got to the room, I kept rewinding and forward-winding the tape, but I could not seem to find the shot of him asleep on his bunk. I kept trying and trying and couldn’t find it and I woke up while I was trying so desperately to find it. Weird, huh?

I started wondering what it would be like if I could now learn what Richard was doing at different points in my life before I even knew he was alive. We are the same age and were experiencing similar things throughout our childhood years, but we never knew the other existed. And, if we were thinking about our future spouse, all our thoughts were speculation. That would make a cool story, wouldn’t it? It would be fun to write about a couple having flashbacks into each other’s lives, seeing what the other was doing while the most important days of each others’ lives were being experienced. Like, what was Richard doing on the day his future wife getting her finger stuck in a steering wheel in high school? What was I doing on the day Richard’s parents told him they were getting a divorce? Or, wouldn’t it be neat if we all knew what our soul mate was doing throughout our lives, but we just didn’t know their names or where they lived?

The dream was so vivid and so odd that I signed up to take Jennifer Shepherd’s new course with the first batch of students. It starts March 1st and it’s going to be really cool, swapping dreams with each other and writing fiction to gives those dreams beginnings and endings. If you want to take the class with me, see:

Hugs, everybody!

Angela