Talk Dreamy to Me.

Children speak in the language of dreams.

Let me illustrate this with an example:

I help with the youth program at the rock climbing gym in town occasionally, and the other day I was helping a 5 year old boy harness up and prepare to climb.  I was wearing my favorite winter hat - a thick knit hat I got when in NYC last winter - to which he pointed and said, "It looks like shrimp."

I took my hat off and held it in my hand as I inspected it: cream, tan, and salmon pink.  Shrimp?  Well, yes.  It did quite resemble the coloring of a shrimp.  "You know, it does kinda look like a shrimp doesn't it?" I replied.

As I have said before, I grew up in a rigidly Catholic house. Because of this, I am quite familiar with stories from the bible.  I remember being a child and hearing the stories in which Jesus praises children - saying how everyone should view the world as children do and that whoever is like a child will have a place in his kingdom.  Hearing those as a child I would think it meant that we were younger and therefore more innocent and that was why we got priority.  As I grew older I stopped thinking about those parables as much; I was older and tainted and no longer had whatever childish qualities would get me through the pearly gates.  However, I think I'm starting to understand them.  I won't pretend to know what Jesus meant, but I know what it means to me to think like a child; it means to dream.  Always.

We are told that as we age we become less imaginative due to the acceptance of certain social mythologies and the more restricted use of our minds.  I'm proposing something else though.  I think we are simply taught to repress it; we don't lose any of our imaginative capacity, it just manifests itself in our dreams and creative outlets rather than being present across every aspect of our lives.  Give a child some free time and she will gather all her dolls and stuffed animals for a make-believe tea party complete with wizards and mermaids, but give an adult some free time and she will find a less-imaginative task to occupy it.  Maybe she will cook or watch tv or read or clean or do homework.  The difference is that as we get older we have a large number of tasks added to our "to-do list" and we use our time to do them rather than to completely invent a task.  This isn't bad nor am I trying to say that all adults completely restrict their imagination (if we did we wouldn't have books or art or science or anything really), it's just saying that in many moments we keep our lives strictly about the task at hand.

Children, on the other hand, let their imagination bleed into everything; they have no separate forms of thinking so it all mashes together.  I worked at a learning center this last summer where I had my own class of 24 3rd graders.  When I think back to myself at 3rd grade I remember a silly looking ginger who sang with all her might.  That's all.  But being around these kids made me remember something else about my past self - my perception.  I can't channel the lens through which I then viewed the world and remember it in entirety, but I do remember thinking in different patterns.  Everyone knows that "kids say the darndest things," but I think it can be attributed to them experiencing everything with a raw mind.  As adults we often perceive things with our emotions first or only pay attention to what directly pertains to ourselves, but in dreams we are whisked away into a world where we notice all sorts of details and encounter implausible (and erotic, desiring, and violent) scenarios.  And we experience it all with our mind fully open.

Kids do this all the time.

It's funny, because we have a lot to learn from kids, but what we have to learn from them is not something they are even aware of, and for them to become aware of it would be for them to cease in doing it.  We can only teach ourselves.  I do think it is a lesson worth learning though.  For the language of dreams is most beautiful indeed.