Is it possible that dreams can help us cope with past distressing situations?
I think so. Here is why.
I had a dog, Adrienne as was her name, that was awesome i can honestly say that she was one of my best friends then, and still today i consider her as such. She was kind, beautiful, crazy, and loved a tennis ball like no one else. She was terrific with people and loved children. One little girl, no older than 6, would play with her and Adrienne would play back, not in the sense that Adrienne was having fun but in the way that an adult plays with a child of that age, to make the child smile. The young girl would chase Adrienne and then Adrienne would chase her back and forth.
Adrienne demanded attention… constantly. She always needed to be thrown a tennis ball. She would chase that ball to no end, practically to the point of having a heart attack.
Just as you become close with a person after spending much time with them so was the case with my relationship with Adrienne. Our whole family grew quite attached to her, as well as or close friends and neighbors.
Everyone that met her knew how wonderful a dog she was.
As you are probably thinking that she died, that is not the case.
I lost her. For which I am eternally sorry.
Her love for people made her impossible to keep outside without a leach, and even with a leach she would pull you where ever a new person might be.
One might think that i was just a bad owner. That i should have trained her to not leave my side. While this might be the case, i honestly did not want her to be some kind of robot dog. I loved her, her personality just the way that it was. I did not want her to change.
When she dug out of our backyard our whole family morned her loss as we would a close friends death. For weeks we hoped and prayed that she would come home. I put up posters and went talk to as many of my neighbors as I could, but she was gone…for good.
I hope that someone picked her up and took her home and treated her as she deserved.
After 2 years I from time to time have a recurring dream about her.
The dreams that I have been having have helped me cope with her leaving. They started out with me running in my neighborhood and seeing Adrienne in a neighbors yard. As I went to confront the unsuspecting neighbor, I saw Adrienne playing with their children. I could not bring myself to take her from that family, as they had formed a similar relationship with Adrienne as my family had.
In a later dream I passed by their house to find that Adrienne was gone.
The family had been convinced to give her to a organization that took in cancer patients in their final few months to live because of her ability to lighten even the most downtrodden souls.
As I know that these are just dreams and not reality, they some kind of way allow me to cope with it.
They also say something about the way that I felt about her.
I think that dreams can be an emotional way of dealing with sad situations.
Maybe our brains know of the heartache caused by the loss of someone close to us, whether a pet or a person, and acts accordingly and presents us with an unlikely, but beautiful, possibility as to what happened.
robwords 