Such an odd dream...

I am teaching method acting to my advanced drama students, who are my Competitive Speech students. It is one of my favorite units of study I get the chance to teach. Very personal. Very strong way to get kids to find deeper ways to create and connect with characters. Very cool way for kids to build stronger bonds with themselves and their teammates.

I also get the chance to share some personal insight with my kids into my own life. I don't do this very often. I get the chance to talk quite a bit about my grandparents and how very different my relationship was with them both. I explain the process of using a person, in the sense memory activity, whom you expect to have a very strong, visceral reaction to seeing sitting in front of you. I explain how you can create one square inch of their hand and have an overwhelming response to it.
So one of these days of instruction, I begin to explain my grandparents to my kids. I explain what triggers emotions when I create one inch of my grandfather's hand or the handkerchief in my grandmother's sleeve.

When thinking about my grandfather, the emotions of heated anger and inadequacy come flooding back over me. He was such a beast when it came to stubbornness. He never smiled. I can feel that sens of always having to explain myself and still not getting through and frustrated doing so.

When thinking about my grandmother, I can still hear her voice in my head. "How is my sweetheart", she would always ask on our weekly Sunday chats. I can see her back to me in the kitchen with the smell of coffee and cinnamon rolls, while she washes dishes in the sink, looking out over the yard. I can see how she would tuck a Kleenex in her sleeve. Emotions flood over me, even after 13 years of her being away.

So I have shared this story with my kids to walk them through "Person" activity for emotional recall. What I was not prepared for was residual feelings to come up in my dreams. I dreamt that I was back in my grandparent's house in Northern Minnesota. I walked in the back door and it all flooded back to me. I could smell everything. I was there in the kitchen. I walked through the doorway to the dining room and into the living room. I could feel the carpet. I could see it all down to every minute detail. I walked into their bedroom and could see the dark paneling on the wall. I saw EVERY picture on the wall, the location of the closet doors, the placement of everything in the room. I KNEW they were already gone. I knew I would not turn around and see them. They had already been gone too long. But everything was as it had always been.

Then all of a sudden, I realize that there is a HUGE fire in the distance. I could see out the living room picture window. An all encompassing fire that had exploded in the distance and I knew that I had to get out of there. I leave and get in my car parked out front. I just look at the house, memories still raw and vibrant,  and can see the flames begin to lap at the barn in the distance, and know that it would soon be consumed. I realize that I have to go back in the house and save whatever I can of them, of their years in their house, of the years we all had shared there. Save whatever I could from the Higdem legacy.

And I could not get back into the house...

The doors were locked...

And I woke up...

What an odd thing to have this moment in my thoughts...Jarring. Shaken. Feeling at peace with beign able to be there for even just one moment more. Knowing that it is not this way anymore, except in the dark recesses of my mind.