An Impressionable Dream

Do you ever wonder what causes us to have the dreams we do? My dreams I've had this night might suggest that Claude, Pierre-Auguste, Paul, Henri, and Vincent were among some of my friends along the stepping-stones of a past I did indeed experience. Though I have the feeling that I walked among them, shared their laughter, and cried within their times of sorrow, I was not one of fame with them in those times. How fitting, and very possible that an impressionist painting I created in my younger years of who I am today, would now appear to be the Spirits of such friends, sending a warm message of love and caring, in a "we miss you so" sort of way. Why am I here again, and yet not one of them here to walk with me in flesh? And where are they? I feel their presence, yet they would be just out of my touch. I seem to sense that they are on the other side, looking after me with that same fondness they expressed so sweetly in the past. Oh, but I do remember that my laughter then was on the same grand scale as now -- robust and full of spirit. The times I spend now at the art museum, in their room, allows me to see why I have always in the past been so comfortable and at home in this room. For when you are with friends, you truly are at home.

I recall crying as my friend Monet grew older and his eyes weakened. It was evident to all of us and showed in his work. What was more evident though was his love for his work and his persistence to carry on. I thanked the Lord, that although my friend was suffering in this experience, one could feel it with ones eyes, and it was present for all to witness, the beauty as well as the sorrow. He found a new insight when mortality began to take its toll and gave us the gift of what he was personally witnessing in those later experiences. As life was fading, so were his eyes, and as his eyes were fading, so were ours opened to feeling his loss.

I recall also how we laughed to hear the rumors that Vincent indeed did loose his ear as the result of the loss of a woman's affections. Though surely he was every bit a man, it truly didn't happen that way. As I have witness caesuras that my current sister experiences, and watch them take a toll on her physical being, so did those same caesuras cause Vincent's ear to be severed on one long ago morning, while shaving. But it might be more romantic to hear of the rumor of the unrequited love of a young woman and it stayed longer than the truth, as does happen most.

This dream does exhaust me so, and I can't tell now if I'm weak from lack of food or from the exhilaration I experience while in this movement of reflecting on my memories of a grander time -- long past. How is it so, that one's dreams can exhaust one so?

Now that I have written down my thoughts, I'll venture back to sleep once more. Do you ever experience some dreams to be like distant rays of endless energy from another time and place that travel beyond their own time and come to settle in our present?