Love and life

On my first trip to Europe, after my second year of high school Global Studies, I visited the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. It was an intense, eye opening experience, and I am truly glad to have had it. For months afterward, however, I had many nights of little or no sleep because of a recurring nightmare. It was the kind of dream that jolts you into waking, and after which you will be very lucky to get any sleep at all. When I had this dream in the past, it shook me to my core, and I learned to just accept that on those nights, I would not sleep. After about 8 months, the dream started to fade, and I would only have it a few times a month, and by the end of my senior year of high school, I was hardly dreaming it at all.

Then, my freshman year of college, I was placed in a seminar course for honor students. It was called Founder's seminar, and the idea was that we, as the best and brightest of the new class, would learn what it meant to be a college student, and, more than that, what it meant to be a community citizen. Each year, there was a theme designated to be the lens through which the course was to be viewed, and ours was expectation. The first semester was a series of presentations from professors with various different fields of expertise, and the second semester was devoted to a project that was meant to present expectation from each students individual point of view.

After days of thinking what experience in my past could possibly represent my view on expectation, I thought of my trip to Dachau, and the idea that was born in me of that trip: The idea that all bigotry is based on some kind of false expectation. So I spent weeks searching through my mind for all of the feelings and reactions that I had had to the things that I saw inside the camp. Not surprisingly, the dreams came back. Still, every night that I had the dream, I was not able to sleep, but I at least had a constructive place to channel the energy, so those nights were somehow less draining. That time, it only took a few weeks for the dreams to melt away again.

Fast forward to 5 years later: Last night I had the dream again, for the first time in a very long time. It was just as vivid as ever, and I woke up with the same feeling, but it was not the same. I was not alone. There was a hand on my arm, and a presence beside me that immediately made me feel safe. And, more amazing than any other part of it, after a drink of water, I laid back down, and went back to sleep.

You don't have to give up freedoms to have another person make you feel safe. I am so grateful that he does that for me.