Author Information
AT THE END OF THE STREAM
Have you ever pondered over our ability to hope?…Have you ever wondered why we dream?…Why we make a wish upon a leaf…and send it down a stream?
Those who know me know I’ve lost most of my hair and I need my glasses if I am to see…but in my dream last night I had hair, I wasn’t wearing glasses…I was handsome…I’m not sure the me in my dream…was me!
When I woke I began to wonder about dreams…what if, in our sleep, we are able to see…not the world as it is…but the world as we’d like it to be?
What if a person whose hearing is lost…in their sleep finds time to rejoice…because there in their dream…loud and clear…they hear their mother’s or father’s voice?
What if a person confined to a wheelchair…while asleep in Hypno’s trance…discovers they can stand…or walk on their own…what if in there in their dream…they can dance?
Children in the midst of war…surrounded by death and destruction every day…what if in their sleep they dream of a world at peace where the only thing children do…is play?
It is comforting to think while we sleep…in dreams at the end of our day…the whole world is at peace…and our troubles have faded away.
So in the reality of the morning we find ourselves waking up to…we find a spark…a flash of hope….that it’s possible for dreams to come true.
Perhaps we are all born to hope…perhaps we were placed on the planet to dream…perhaps the fulfillment of our wishes lies on that leaf…on that leaf at the end of the stream.
I have never heard the custom
I have never heard the custom of wishing upon a leaf and sending it down a stream. Is that a real practice? I live just a fifth of a mile from one of our county's major creeks, with pleny of foliage around it for leaf-wishing, but I, during my adolescence, never knew that such a custom existed.
The stanza about the person bound to a wheel chair having a dream about walking actually happened to me a couple of weeks ago. An interal spinal injury confines me to my chair, and I did dream, one night, that I was walking about the house. Today, with my caregiver absent, I took a few independent steps in the corridor toward the bathroom.
Starward