I just woke up from a dream in which I had shown up at a dance studio that means a lot to me, bags with me having just landed from a flight. I was hanging around the studio with friends, catching up on news from our lives, and discussing some mundane details like a discount on the tuition that hadn't gone through, but that I felt I probably didn't need anyway.
It felt joyful, and exciting. I felt invigorated to come back the next day, that I had something to contribute to the morning's circle. A new adventure had begun, I was back for an intensive, and I was so glad to be with friends I only got to see in this dance microcosm.
This time, too, there was something special: I knew I wasn't there to take the test. I was just there for the ride. I felt easy about the whole thing.
I've got to say, it felt really good to feel that again. This was a dream in the truest sense, not in the waking world, "if you can see it you can be it" kind of way, but a deeply authentic emotional hallucination that was motivating and alive. I felt like I was there, and I was having a good experience with dance. I felt like I belonged.
It felt like the grain of sand from which I could rebuild an entire world.
Also, it reminded me that my previous intensive actually was a good experience, in which I made new friends, had a great time working with other dancers, and genuinely reminded myself that my increasingly creaky body was capable of knitting together its years of knowledge with a week of hard work to produce a final product I was proud of. I'd had fun, and I had left the studio last time feeling like something magical had happened. Regardless of what happened after, I left feeling like some part of my spiritual home could be found in dance still.
I woke up to the rain hitting hard and fast against the bedroom windows in the house I'm building, remembering that at least one was open. I leapt into action, closed up against the inundation, and laid back down to savour that dream a little longer. To contemplate what it meant. To take that very real feeling of a fresh dream and see if I could blend its contours back into the topography of everyday life. To feel whether or how I could get back on the horse.
I'm going to hold this in my heart a little longer. Another intensive has just passed at that same studio, and I hadn't thought I felt much about that as it was happening. But, this morning, creaky bones and all, I find myself writing this. Thinking of my dancing ladies today.