I dreamed that my home had become a place where ordinary rules no longer applied.
Cars changed shape.
Dogs found their own way home.
Mechanical animals waited to be collected.
Gardens climbed walls.
People floated.
Security multiplied.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, I became involved in a heist I had apparently forgotten I was planning.
Dreams are generous like that.
They do not always explain themselves before handing you the plot.
At the entrance to the complex, I gave an old dog to a guard while I moved my car. By the time I returned, the dog had already started making his way home.
He did not need rescuing.
He simply knew where he belonged.
Nearby, a neighbour’s gate hung slightly open. Five white dogs pressed themselves toward the gap to greet me.
Two tiny ones.
Two lanky ones.
One shaped something like a husky.
I rubbed their bellies through the gate and pointed out that the latch might need securing.
Then I left.
The dogs were loved.
The problem had been noticed.
The responsibility, however, was not mine.
This distinction is harder to learn than it sounds.
There is a difference between seeing a problem and being appointed its keeper.
A difference between offering help and assuming ownership.
A difference between care and rescue.
Later I found myself inside the neighbour’s house without having knocked.
I realised that I had once been accustomed to walking into that house when somebody else lived there.
The old rule had followed me into a new situation.
I apologised.
The new owner accepted it.
And I left.
Perhaps that is another kind of care.
Recognising that something which was once permitted may no longer belong to us.
Old habits can survive long after the circumstances that created them.
Sometimes growth is simply noticing that the door is no longer ours to open.
Outside, the garden had become impossible.
Flowers grew everywhere.
Across the ground.
Over hills deliberately shaped to create more planting space.
Up the walls.
The house looked almost iced with them.
Too many flowers.
Far too many.
I immediately decided I wanted more in my own garden.
There is something about abundance that makes moderation difficult.
A garden cared for repeatedly becomes transformed.
Not because someone planted one flower.
Because someone returned.
Watered.
Pruned.
Weeded.
Returned again.
Care accumulates.
So does neglect.
The world is full of evidence of both.
At the gate there were suddenly five security guards where one had stood before.
Their uniforms were absurd.
Layers of coloured blazers.
Purple.
Sand-gold.
Too much fabric for the job.
I laughed at them.
Then I noticed that one young guard’s hair, eyes and outer jacket seemed to share exactly the same colour.
Attention altered him.
For a moment he became extraordinarily beautiful.
Perception does that sometimes.
We look again and the thing we had dismissed changes.
Then I wished them luck with whatever was about to happen, laughed like a lunatic, produced a strange wheeled bag from nowhere, and walked out into the street.
Apparently I had somewhere important to be.
The road had become a river of mud.
At first I walked along the edge.
Then I slipped.
The mud was thick enough to move through but too dense to fight.
So I didn’t.
I laughed.
And I let it carry me.
That may have been the wisest thing I did in the entire dream.
There are moments when resistance looks like strength but is actually waste.
Some currents are bigger than us.
Some circumstances cannot be defeated by struggling harder.
Sometimes survival begins with recognising what cannot presently be controlled.
Save the energy.
Stay afloat.
Wait for somewhere useful to put your feet.
Then I caught up with a woman and two children.
The mud deepened.
The children could no longer keep their heads above it.
And suddenly the question changed.
It was no longer:
Can I stop the river?
It became:
Who needs lifting?
I picked up the boy.
The mother tried to hold the girl.
The mud rose higher.
The girl disappeared beneath the surface.
So I put the boy on my shoulders, held my breath, went beneath the mud, and lifted the mother upward from underneath.
There are people we should not carry.
And there are moments when carrying someone is exactly what love requires.
The difficult part is learning the difference.
We can spend years exhausting ourselves trying to carry people who are perfectly capable of walking.
And then one day we encounter someone who genuinely cannot keep their head above the surface.
Boundaries do not require indifference.
Discernment does not require hardness.
Care is not a refusal to carry.
It is knowing when the weight is truly ours to hold.
Everything went dark.
When I woke inside the dream, I was lying on a couch backstage somewhere.
A large vanity mirror stood nearby.
The little boy was there.
Clean.
So was I.
I looked at him and said,
“Hey, little man. We made it out.”
I told him I had expected us to emerge looking like cookies.
He explained that a doctor had removed something from him slowly because taking it out too quickly would have killed him.
That stayed with me.
Sometimes healing cannot be rushed either.
The thing hurting us may need removing.
The habit.
The belief.
The dependency.
The fear.
The relationship.
The old wound we have built our lives around.
But even freedom sometimes requires tenderness.
Some knots tighten when pulled.
Some things must be loosened gradually.
Healing can be an act of patience as much as courage.
Then the boy said he was hungry.
A man sitting at the mirror had a stack of individually wrapped pizza slices beside him.
He complained that planning a good heist had become almost impossible.
And suddenly I remembered.
The increased security.
The bag.
The secrecy.
I had been part of an organisation planning a mass robbery.
Someone had leaked the plan.
I had been on my way to collect my share.
Dreams occasionally reveal our moral complexity with absolutely no concern for tone.
The man reluctantly selected a slice of pizza and handed it to me.
The boy was hungry.
So I gave him mine.
The man stared at me in disgust.
Not because I had fed the child.
Because he had chosen that piece specifically for me.
Then he selected another.
For the first time, I found myself holding two slices.
One blue.
One purple.
One covered in olives.
And instead of immediately deciding that mine should disappear into somebody else’s hands, I began wondering which one the child would actually enjoy.
Perhaps that is progress too.
Not:
You or me.
But:
You and me.
There are forms of generosity that quietly become self-erasure.
There are forms of sacrifice that eventually create another person who needs rescuing.
Care that never turns inward does not remain care forever.
Eventually it becomes depletion.
Perhaps we are meant to notice the dogs without adopting every one.
Warn someone about the open gate without moving into their garden.
Help a drowning child without deciding we must carry every adult we meet.
Allow the river to carry us when fighting it would only exhaust us.
Lift someone when they truly cannot stand.
And accept the piece that was chosen especially for us.
Maybe that is one of the harder lessons of being alive.
Care is not measured by how much of ourselves we are willing to lose.
It is measured by how wisely we keep returning.
To others.
To ourselves.
To the garden.
To the wound.
To the boundary.
To the meal.
Again and again.
Long enough for something to change.
Long enough for neglected things to become tended.
Long enough for the mud to become a story told from somewhere dry.
And perhaps, every now and then, long enough to realise that somebody handed us a slice too.
And that we are allowed to eat it.