It should be a law that after a session you are allowed the rest of day to sleep, eat ice cream, and ruminate about your session.  I was so wiped after this morning I'm not sure how I made it through the work day.  Luckily it was Friday, and luckily (sort of) I had back-to-back-to-back meetings so there wasn't any downtime for me.  But I still felt 'floaty' and not really present most of the day.

I had a dream last night (well actually I'm having lots of dreams lately....) in which my partner, our daughter, and I were in a plane crash.  Actually the plane never crashed, but we were in the throws of it.  The plane was so out of control that we clipped oil rigs out in the ocean, and we were flying so low that we were able to wave to people on the beaches.  Oddly the plane actually landed at some tropical island, I went out and got ice cream, came back on the place, and then the scary ride continued.

So you ask, what does this dream mean??

Well, for the past 6 months I have been working on a plan to quit my current corporate-type job, my family would sell our house, and we would move 2 hours north and buy and ice cream shop! We are very close to completing a deal, and we met with another realtor last night regarding selling our home.  Unfortunately she informed us that our house is now worth $65,000 less than when we bought it 8 years ago.  This basically means that when/if we sell our house we probably won't do any better than break even.  To say the least, my partner and I were in a state of shock.  The poor realtor did know what to say to us. 

I think M and I knew all along, subconsciously, that we didn't have much equity in the house.  We bought the place before the housing market crashed.  Oddly enough I watched this movie last week 'Too Big To Fail' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1742683/.  It was really good, and gave me a much better understanding of what happened.  Unfortunately I didn't fully realize, or wasn't willing to admit that we were one losers that bought high and now would sell low.

M and I had so many emotions last night.  From being angry, to feeling like failures, and then everything in between.  I did my best to not shutdown, but it was hard, and I wasn't completely successfully, but I didn't totally check out either.  And then the big question that lingered.....what do we do about living out this crazy dream of buying an ice cream shop, moving to a quaint New England college town, and simplifying our lives?

We were both crushed, for so many reasons.

Odd, but I was also mad that I knew I'd have to take up some of my session with L today talking about this.  I didn't want to.  I'm so sick of talking, and planning, and thinking out of the box, and shifting money, and......everything else that comes in to play with uprooting your whole family.  I eat, sleep, and drink it.  I just want off of this crazy ride.......see where the airplane crash comes in?????

What I really wanted to talk to L about was our relationship and the realization that the dream I had was about her.  I mean I didn't actually want  to talk to her about it, but I also knew that I'd regret it if I didn't somehow start the conversation.

So I did something that I don't normally do, in fact not sure if I've ever done it.  I went in, sat down, and started talking right away.  No banter, no warm up, no skirting the subject, no lighthearted conversation.  I told her about the dream, what happened with the realtor, and how M and I handled it afterwards.

L of course was her usual glass-half-full and although she totally understood why I was feeling defeated she felt that it wasn't clearly a deal breaker.  We have other options, which we do, and this was all still workable.  I, on the other hand still needed to lick my wounds for a while so I gave a lot of sarcastic responses to her supportive words.  I kept saying to her that I didn't want to spend my time talking about this today, and then I would continue talking.....go figure.

After hashing that through for about 45 minutes she finally shifted and said 'Ok, what is it that you also really need to get out today?' Funny, that pretty much caused me stop talking and go into I-don't-know-land. So we  played the guessing game for a while until I was able to get out some painful cryptic words to describe what was going on in my head.

I was somehow able to communicate that I was bothered by the realization I had the other day concerning my dreams about having an affair.  She said she took those dreams has me wanting to have more intimacy with my partner M, m, ore connection.  And although I agree with that it occurred to me that the person in the dream that I was having the affair with was her.  .........that's hard to even write, never mind say out loud.

As you can imagine this lead down a very difficult, painful, and embarrassing conversation.  She said she was flattered.

Because I took so long to get to this place of talking we ran out of time, even though we went over time, it was nearly a 2 hour session. And writing about it now I can't remember exactly what was said, I only allowed some of it in.  And now 24 hours, how do I feel?  I guess I'm ok, but as much as I like to process/ruminate about my sessions, I'm having a hard time with that right now.  And maybe that's a good thing.