Published September 1, 2018

Peace has too often eluded me, but I woke up from a powerful dream this morning with an unprecedented calm that feels like how I’m guessing a person at peace must feel.

I was at the house that our family moved into when I was a teenager. My parents, both gone now, were younger in the dream than when we lived there. They were complaining that I had broken a part of a doorway leading to the back patio. I had not.

“Let’s just blame Carly,” I said, angrily. “Everyone will believe she did it. Let’s blame her.”

That seemed to satisfy my dad, who got a beer out of the refrigerator and tilted the top of the unopened bottle in my direction as if air-clinking glasses with me for a virtual toast.

I’m laughing after typing all of that, because of course I am. I immediately knew that the point of the dream was not to be found in the particulars of what I had or hadn’t done.

Peace

That was just context, a setting. What has me at peace is that I referred to myself in the dream as Carly, and with female pronouns, to a mom and dad who gave me a different name that was put on a birth certificate that calls me a boy. I remember the spirit of my dad’s words better than I do the specifics, and taken together with his beer-bottle salute, it said, “OK.”

With me being well into my transition and life as a transgender woman, it felt like acceptance that I cannot get from him in the three-dimensional world I live and communicate in while awake. I have a new name, and a new gender identity, and I am beyond happy that my subconscious mind used them in a seemingly unrelated conversation with my parents.

I also have a new feeling, and a new tag on my growing list of blog post tags.

Peace.

Photo by lzf via Shutterstock