My Dream

I had a dream when I was 14 that has impacted my life ever since

During the summer as a 14 year old, my parents, siblings, and I made the 12 hour long drive from Orem, Utah to visit my grandparents in Glendale, Arizona. The first night of my summer vacation visit, as I slept in one of the extra bedrooms in my grandparent’s house, I had a dream that would significantly impact my life.

In my dream, I stood at the base of a beautiful, large oak tree that I recognized from my neighborhood in Orem that I passed each day on my paper route. Each day I was awestruck by the tree’s majesty and beauty. It was probably 50 or 60 feet tall and just as wide. Its branches were strong and the green of its leaves were a deeper green than most of the trees in the area. At least they seemed greener to me.

In my dream, white light surrounded me and the tree and seemed to come from every direction. A woman who I didn’t know was waiting for me in the highest branches of the tree. I climbed high into the tree to the branch where she was waiting for me. When I got to her, she smiled at me and opened her arms and embraced me. As she hugged me, I felt, by far, the most deeply beautiful feelings of acceptance, love, and happiness that I had ever experienced. My dream and the blissful feelings I was experiencing lasted for what seemed like hours. I absorbed as much happiness and unconditional love as I possibly could. I had never in my life felt as safe and loved as I did in my dream.

When the sunlight of morning began to fill the room I was sleeping in, I felt myself waking up. “I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to go back to my life,” I told the woman in my dream. “You are never alone,” she said in response. As she said those words, she embraced me once more and I woke up.

Waking up felt like getting lost. Waking up meant that I was leaving the beautiful being and the feeling of love and happiness that she somehow transferred to me. I tried the rest of the morning to fall asleep again, but I couldn’t.

The impact of my dream on my life as a 14 year old was huge. For days, my dream was all I could think about. I was in a constant state of bliss. For weeks I could recreate within myself the beautiful feelings of happiness, joy, and love that I experienced in my dream, but my ability to recreate those beautiful feelings began to diminish with time. As my ability to feel as deeply happy and loved as I did in my dream diminished, my obsession with finding that happiness, joy, and love again grew stronger and stronger.

I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what I had experienced nor did I understand it. I told no one about it. It was mine. All I knew was that it was beautiful and I wanted to have it in my life again, more than anything that I had ever wanted before. I knew that I was searching for something only based on a feeling, but I knew that finding it again was achievable. The deep feelings of love and acceptance that I experienced in my dream showed me what love between two people could feel like and I couldn’t wait to have that in my life.