Sometimes I really wonder how connected we are to the past and how people from our past can affect our current realities even if they aren’t alive.
To provide early context Leonard Thompson was somebody that I was super close with my whole life. He was for all intense purposes a genuine father figure and somebody who I role modeled myself after while growing up. He was one of the few people to have come to my graduation from high school and his continued hard-core support allowed to me successfully navigate myself through a number of hard ships as both a teenager and young adult. He was also my mom’s boyfriend and my friend as well.
Sadly Len passed away during Hurricane Sandy and a day hasn’t gone by where I haven’t been thinking about him.
I really don’t dream very often but for some reason last night was different.
In the dream, it seemed so real my mom and myself were eating at an Italian restaurant in downtown Freehold NJ where I grew up. The food gets delivered to us then all of a sudden, Len shows up and walks up to our table and I remembered having this really surprised and dumbfounded look on my face. It was almost like, what are you doing here? You just passed away.
Before Len says a word, he smiles at me and puts his hand on my shoulder almost like comforting me in a way. All of a sudden upon putting his hand on my shoulder. I wake up, my heart is racing and I am also really thirsty. For whatever reason, I then walk into the kitchen in hopes of getting a glass of water only to find out that my roommate had left the stove on and the hard-boiled eggs he was cooking were burning. I quickly acted and proceeded to turn off the stove and in doing so stopped a potential fire from happening.
It took me a while to connect the dots and see the significance of this dream. I did come to the conclusion that if Len had not been a part of my dream I would not have woken up to turn the stove off. In essence the argument could be made that Len’s presence in my dream helped me stop a potential fire from happening.
I have been thinking about this event for most of the day. Sometimes life events overwhelm you and you are just trying to literally connect the dots to understand their significance. Tonight is one of those nights.
