I had a dream and it opened my eyes. So funny how this happens sometimes, during sleep or its edges our brains open and admit ideas we cannot consider during the day when the mind is wearing a suit, playing the daytime role and maintaining its vigilance. Yes, it keeps us operating, but in its watchfulness it keeps up walls that can block out the useful too.

In the dream, drifting there in the foggy place before I was awake, I saw her wearing a ninja scarf and holding out a sword, ready to battle with me. I stood and looked at her, then turned and walked away. She stood there holding out the sword as if in protection, but I had no business with her, and her sword would not protect her. I took up the hands of my children and we walked a path up the side of the mountain.

She says she is certain that with a tiara and cape she could conquer the world. She says that she is fierce, a ninja of the good and awesome. She sees herself as a brave warrior, protecting victims and innocents, and that she is doing so from strength. Yet I understand that all this external valor really masks of an almost pathological, fundamental sense of insecurity, which may be so buried she isn’t even aware it is there. Deep down, in the places she may not even visit, she does not believe that she is worthy. As long as she maintains the facade, as long as no one else can see this truth, perhaps she too can forget what she really feels, deep in these hidden crevices of her soul.

Recently, I communicated directly with her and she did not like this at all.  She believed that I was delusional and therefore cut off any communication, believing that she did so from power, from strength. I am superior and you are not worthy of my time, the action said. I am better than you.

The truth though, was that I made her uneasy because I had already been somewhere she has not yet been willing to go. At a level she cannot comprehend with her mind, she knew this. Yet the hidden place deep within her understood. It knew that I was facing this fear, was staring it down, was climbing the mountain and learning to ignore the battles that do not matter, and this knowledge terrifies her in that fundamental, unconscious place. She does not understand that I was not challenging her at all, and would turn away from unnecessary battles with her because real power comes from the realization of inner strength, not from the slaying of a perceived adversary. What she truly needs to understand is that I am not her foe, and that her only true enemy is herself, that a cape and tiara will not give her the power to conquer the world, but that really loving herself will give her the strength to realize she doesn’t even have to fight.

I wish her well on this journey.