The Monsters Stop Chasing When You Choose to Jump

My whole life, my dreams have been telling me things. I'm choosing to listen.

I had a number of recurring nightmares when I was a child.

The one that visited me the most often, I was running up a flight of stairs. Watching myself run up them from the third-person.

Being chased by a great big monster.

Endlessly running, with no end in sight.

This nightmare visited me for years, regularly.

And then one year it evolved. Now I was running up the stairs, with my sisters. Every person for themselves, we weren’t trying to help each other! I’d often outrun them, but never find a proper escape route.

I’d wake up terrified, crying every time. Afraid to go back to sleep, afraid to end up on another doomed stair climb (maybe this is why I detest the gym stair climber?).

Dozens of dream iterations later, I reached the top of the stairs.

There was an open door just a little too far out into the abyss to reach. And just as the monster was reaching out to grab me, I’d wake up in a fit.

The last time I had the dream — standing at the top of the stairs, someone told me to jump. Told me it would be alright.

So I did.

My whole life, dreams have been telling me things.

All week I’ve been dreaming about past relationships. In every one, they seem to be asking, “how much do you really want to be done with this?”

And this time around I’m conscious enough to realize — it’s a test of my programming system. The program that runs in each one of us, holding us back from becoming someone else entirely.

It can be escaped, but it’s not without its challenges.

And like that dream, I’m determined to jump and believe “it will be alright”.

For a time, my mom would take us kids around to Pow-Wows. We became regular faces in the crowd, and volunteered for various tasks.

One time, I was trusted with making buttons unsupervised. (I’m sure I fucked a lot of them up..)

There was an elder who talked to me a lot, and by the time I earned the trusted button maker role, he also started calling me “Little Dreamer.”

He died two weeks later.

It’s one of my arm tattoos.

I’d like to think if he were still alive, he’d now call me “Big Dreamer.”