Over the past years, since retirement, I have dreamed incessantly of days gone wrong, programs gone wrong. Where I was blamed for even the slightest issue, even the tiniest wrongs. I pleaded and begged the people in the dreams to listen. The tital wave would hit. The village was flooding. The Vikings were on the horizon but, for whatever reason, they would not listen.
One of the most vivid dreams I have had (more than once) featured an airport hanger, dark in the dead of night. I had invited 50 children to fly to a foreign country, as a part of an exchange program. When the night came, they arrived with their luggage, but without proper paperwork. My assistant dutifully provided all necessary paperwork. Parents signed it with their children interpreting the information—as these parents were refugees.
When all of a sudden, about 100 more kids showed up! We only had room for the children who had originally been accepted into the program. And the new children all wanted to go. Nobody understood why the new arrivals were not going to be allow to go! I was one of the only people in the hanger who spoke English. I was in the minority. I kept trying to explain what I knew: that we only had room for 50 kids on the plane.
The children interpreted my message to the parents. I knew not only did we need the kids we had invited to go, but that their parents needed to sign the releases to let them cross international borders with us, we are acquaintances with them, but clearly not parents. And the airplane was on the tarmac. I could smell the diesel fuel. Hear the roar of the engines!
The parents of the kids who were signed up were suddenly upset that the kids who HAD NOT signed up couldn’t go, as well. One kid told me that the airplane was big enough for all the kids. Why couldn’t they go, too? Parents’ faces were pleading me to let them go. It was to be an educational and recreational trip. WHY COULDN’T I LET THEM ALL GO?
And my feelings in this dream ran from calm to panic to calm to compassion to empathy to sympathy to panic and on and on. I KNEW the rules. I knew the laws. I’m an American. American teachers know not to drive, let alone FLY kids anywhere without express permission from custodian parents.How could these parents not KNOW THIS? Oh, right. They were New Americans. They had endured war and hunger and just the worst atrocities and if ANYONE was going to go? It was going to be THEIR child. Their child would benefit from the experience and they trusted that I would keep them safe.
And I would. I WOULD.
In real life, I would have and still would lay my life on the line for a child. I would run into traffic to pull a child to safety. I’ve always known this. So, this dream, this recurring dream, I finally figured out? Was not about my coming up short with the parents. Not about parents NOT trusting me—my biggest fear. It was about RED TAPE. About my inability to do something against the rules because I feared reprisal. Not from the people who loved and adored the children. But those who feared the worst—a law suit, because the paperwork wasn’t filled out correctly.
RED TAPE. Thats what that nightmare was about.And, in some ways, ethics. Doing what is right when I could have bent to the will of the parents. And what was right, maybe wasn’t really. Or, why would I continue to have this dream? Inner conflict. Moral dilemmas. They haunt me, even in my sleep.
