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I'm pretty sure I was called a daydreamer when I was growing up. My mom encouraged me to dream big.

I saw movies like Poltergeist, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street when I was pretty young. And as I'm sure you can guess, they gave me horrible nightmares. 

I almost always remember my dreams.  As a kid, my dreams seemed so real.  Where I was being chased.  And I would wake up terrified.  And not be able to fall back to sleep.  The shadows on my walls haunted me.  I finally figured out that I had to learn how to rewrite the endings.  I would fall back to sleep and pick up the dream where I left off, but now I could fly - or swim - and be able to breathe underwater to escape whoever or whatever was chasing me.

As I got older, the dreams changed a bit, but still woke me up in the middle of the night.  Dreams like walking through the hallways in high school and not remembering my schedule or my locker combination.  Or driving a stick shift car and approaching an intersection - and realizing I don't know how to drive stick and I can't get the car to stop (now, I realize that these two issues aren't related, however, in my dream they were).

When I was pregnant with Abigail, the dreams were amazingly vivid, and sometimes so confusing.  At the time, I worked for an insurance brokerage firm.  Everyday I started my work day with my friend, Liane, and over the cubicle wall I would tell her all the details of my dream from the night before and we would spend the rest of the morning analyzing it.

Recently, Abbi asked me to take her to Hot Topic to do some shopping with her Christmas money.  She found this sweatshirt.  I love what it says, "They've promised that dreams come true, but they forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams too."

This quote's placement on a yin yang symbol isn't coincidental.  The yin yang symbol represents perfect balance and harmony of opposing forces.  One cannot exist without the other.  Light and Dark.  Water and Fire. North and South.  Even numbers and odd numbers.  Numbers - okay, now you're speaking my language.  For those of you that don't know,  I love numbers.  Mostly even numbers, but even if they aren't even, I try to turn the number into a math equation so that the answer is an even number.  When I got my first cell phone, I had to work some serious flirtatious magic to get the guy at Circuit City to give me a number with all even numbers.  Yes, it was that important. 

This concept of opposing forces is interesting to pull apart.  Can you really ever appreciate the sun if you never feel the rain? Can you know joy without sorrow?  I'm entirely guilty of feeling like the sun will never shine again when it's raining.  I can't even remember what summer feels like when we're in the middle of a blizzard.  Like whatever I'm going through is never going to get better.  I get stuck there.

And then on the flip side, I can be overly optimistic when things ARE better.  My sunshine is eternal. Which maybe is a crazy way of saying that ignorance is bliss.  Yeah, I'm guilty of that too. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt (because I know there is always so much more happening in a situation that I don't know about).  And I generally want to stay stuck there. 

But there should be balance and harmony, right?  There will be good days and bad days.  Days where you feel like you're on cloud nine and days when you don't even want to get out of bed.  So the trick is to not stay stuck there.  You can't be oblivious to all the signs pointing in a certain direction, but you also have the power to pave your own path.  You have a choice. 

Want to know something?  That driving-stick-shift nightmare was a reoccurring dream for me.  It started when I learned how to drive (when I was 17) and I would have it about once a month.  When Brian and I got married (when I was 21), and his car was a manual transmission Nissan Altima, he taught me how to drive it.  I had that nightmare for FOUR years.  Once I got the hang of driving stick, I never had that dream again. 

So believe in yourself.  Believe in the power you hold.  And don't be afraid to take a few steps off the path.  If it isn't going the way you want it to, then take a few steps back, get back on the path and then try again a little farther down the road.  If you're facing a nightmare, you can rewrite the end of your dream.  The choice is yours.  It's always yours.  That's power, isn't it?