Years ago – half a lifetime ago, to be honest – I started dating my first serious boyfriend.
We were seventeen and high school sweethearts, so of course I had already tacked his last name onto mine in my diary; dreaming of the days university would be over and he would seek my hand in marriage. I was mostly in love and terribly committed as only a teenager can be.
Three years into the relationship, and it was painfully evident we were hanging on just for the sake of hanging on. We fought constantly; had bitter words to say that were never totally forgotten after each passing fight, and the truth is, he was not growing into the dedicated paramour I had dreamed of, and I was not the free-spirited, easy-going girlfriend he had counted on.
We were doomed.
And so we would break up and make up – on and off for almost a year. Our first “official” break-up was in September 1999, but then, we could be seen going out here and there and even spending a long weekend together right up until August 2000.
Just before our final seperation in the summer of 2000, I began having a recurring dream.
It made absolutely no sense to me (and yet haunted me with a frequency of at least 1-2 times per week): in the dream, I would be working, driving, shopping, walking along a beach at night – really, insert any life scenario here – and I’d be licking a blue lollipop. But not just any lollipop; a big, round one… I suppose it would be slightly bigger than a Chupa Chup but smaller than a Big Mouth. It was hard to handle once in my mouth, but I kept at it just the same, trying to make it fit. I could taste the sweet, blue raspberry stickiness and just about get my teeth around it for a bite. But in the end – always, in the end – I’d pull it out of my mouth in frustration, and start smashing it against a hard surface until it shattered into pieces. And once among me, the sticky, blue mess, I’d feel a lot better.
After my boyfriend and I broke up for the final time, the dream stopped.
At the time, I didn’t pay the dream very much mind. I didn’t have to – this was before the days of Google Search when I could simply have an armchair analyst decode the dream in an instant.
However, as luck would have it, one of my friends was very much into “spiritual introspection” and had long since befriended an impressive assortment of tarot readers, Reiki massage therapists, psychics and of course, a dream interpreter. And that’s how I found myself at the home of a renowned spiritual healer who happened to specialize in dream analysis….