Brain Injury Is: not mailing a letter that is sitting on the car seat next to you for three days because it did not have a stamp on it, and not connecting that with the thought of stopping to buy a stamp.
Dreams! We all have had them. Some are memorable, most are not. I remember dreaming of becoming a great singer like Marty Robbins and having the ability to play the piano like Van Cliburn. Of course, I never practiced singing, or playing the piano, and never really took those dreams seriously. They were just dreams. They held little value for me. There were other dreams, however, that I did take seriously, and which I tried hard to make come true. I worked at them and practiced hard to them turn into reality.
The dreams which were important to me were ones on which I built my concept of who I was and what I did. They were dreams of holding together my family in the midst of trials and day-to-day life type struggles. They were the dreams of owning my own company and being my own boss. They were the dreams of living in a brand new house on a lake and having my own fishing boat. They were the dreams of being respected in the community where I lived for the kind of work that I could do and the type of person that I could become. Finally, there were the dreams of what the future might bring and success in being a better person. A person can work a lifetime to attain goals, and can be considered a success in life by continually trying to achieve his dreams in an organized way.
There are situations in life that can effect one's dreams, however. No matter who you are, or where in life you might be, something can prevail on all your good efforts, steal all your dreams, and make dreaming almost impossible. Something as common as a stroke can break every dream you ever had, and do it in a short period of time, as overnight. Like me, you can go to bed thinking you have the world by the tail, and wake up with all your dreams shattered. You can go to sleep a mental "Rambo," and wake up a mental "Pee Wee Herman." All of the dreams that held your world together have disappeared. You are left standing alone in a world that no longer makes any sense. Everything is different, everyone has changed. You are left to cope with skills that seem strange and are not as efficient as the skills you had prior to the event that robbed you of your dreams in the first place.
You might, like I did, end up in a hospital and have surgery to correct whatever it was that happened. No doctor told me this, but, personally, I think all of my dreams leaked out during that operation. They disappeared, vanished. This was a loss that did not show up on X-Ray. The loss of my dreams was not noticeable when the doctors looked at the CT scans, no matter how hard they looked. The professionals who were in charge of my care did not see them leave. They did not really care so much for my dreams as they did for my health.
When I was in therapy, only days after surgery, the health care givers helped work on my ability to sit on a huge rubber ball with a handle. They did not see my loss of dreams. They also worked on my math skills, such as having me add two and three. I got sick to my stomach and threw up on the person giving me those impossible tests. I couldn't handle the stress and it seemed as if the therapists could care less what I had lost at that time. Several years later, when I had finally reached a point in my life where I recognized that the world hadn't changed because of my aneurysm, but that I had, the reality of all those lost dreams became of grave concern to me.
I found that I was sitting in my recliner much of the day with nothing to do. I was looking ahead in life and only seeing nighttime and retiring to bed. Tomorrow was not of concern because today was not over. Looking out my window at the parking lot took up much of my energy. I thought that if I could feel my feet on the floor when I got up in the morning, nothing else would matter. When I got up in the morning I had, as my major goal in life, to simply make it through the day so I could go to bed again.
I had replaced my new home which overlooked a lake, with subsidized housing. I replaced old friends with new ones. I had bought old furniture through the bargain basement want ads to replace the new furniture that had been repossessed during bankruptcy proceedings. I replaced my ability to earn an income with Social Security Disability checks. I had lost my old dreams, but had not yet thought of replacing them with new ones.
When I lost my dreams, I lost everything that mattered. The most painful thing of all was my inability to see anything ahead of me that was important. I could only see today, and not much of that. I had always been a dreamer, and I remember once getting a bright blue T-shirt that said, "You are always chasing rainbows." It had a picture of a rainbow trout on it. Now I had no dreams left. I was at the lowest point of my life, thinking that I had no tomorrow. It was at this point that a major decision had to be made about my future. Although I had survived the aneurysm and was physically alive, I had been acting for four years as if I were dead. I could continue to act like that, but that option was not acceptable to me. I could commit an act that would actually end my life, and for a while that seemed like a pretty good idea. The third alternative was to take back my life, and start to accept responsibility for my own attitude and for my own dreams. I chose the latter. I gave myself permission to move ahead with my life.
I wonder to this day why no doctor had ever talked to me about something so important to me as my dreams. Was it because that no doctor thought I had any to start with and, therefore, did not lose them? Was it because doctors are trained to mend broken arteries but not trained to heal broken dreams? I have been taught how to ride rubber balls, add two and three, make brownies, and write yellow "stick-um" notes, but I don't remember being taught how to dream. Maybe the therapists who work with people who have had brain injuries don't see dreams that once were, but aren't anymore, as important.
Maybe dream building should be made a mandatory therapy for all of us who have had brain injuries. If all the therapists had to undergo special classes in how to teach people to dream again, we'd be in better shape. They teach us how to walk and talk again; how about teaching us to dream again. Dreams are free and require no special equipment. Teaching us to see tomorrow is as easy as teaching us to look out of a window. There are no obstructions and the whole world is out there to view. My life can be as great as my dreams, so teach me to dream again, and dream big. Look out world, here I come again.