She was always interested in dreams. There were dreams that she had at night, while asleep and there was daydreaming, aspirations, her imagination traveling far away.
She used to be an avid reader. And because she loved the books so much, she would spent days after a good book, imagining about the book. Tom Sawyer... She was with him, on the river, going up and down on adventures. The turn of the screw, she would spend nights haunted by tormented spirits.
Sometimes she would wake up to a very impressive dream. She would stay in bed, holding her eyes tight to see if the dream would come back. As it wouldn't, she would then start her conscious continuation of the dream.
Once she was spending the night on a country property. It was an old house, with no electricity. During the day she had heard about a big rat in the barn, that chased the dog away. Sure enough, she had a nightmare about giant rats chasing her. Her father came to check on her and she woke up screaming: "help! save me from the big rat".
One of her brothers was a sleep walker. Her siblings and her would stay awake late sometimes to wait for him to start walking. They would make him go all around the house. They would talk to him, give him orders, as if he was hypnotized. She would wonder if he was dreaming about all that while her siblings were laughing.
Looking at her pets sleeping, she could tell when they too were having dreams. She was sure that they had conscious dreams as well. That's why they had those puppy eyes that were always begging.
When here father died, she started dreaming about another man coming to her family, someone just like her dad, that would fall in love with her mom and they would live happily ever after. She would elaborate on the story. He would meet with her mom not by chance, but by destiny. Her mom would stop crying, because she would know that he was the one and their life that had been interrupted since her father passed away, would then continue as before.
He would be healthy, he would wear shorts and go to the beach with them. No hats, no sunscreen. They would go fishing again and he would join them swimming at the mouth of the river.
At that time she had been diagnosed with keratoconus and her eyesight and degrading very rapidly. She was fitted with contact lenses. At the doctor's office, she was given a pair of trial lenses. When she went back to the waiting room with them on, she looked at her mom. She still remembers her blouse. For years she thought it was a solid gray blouse, but it was in fact a white blouse with an intricate blue print. She saw her face and her blue eyes. Her mother was so beautiful. She gave her a hug and said: "what pretty blouse you are wearing, mom. Is it new?" Since kindergarten she had poor eyesight, but she was a smart student, never had problems in school besides poor handwriting and too much talking. Only at the end of 5th grade she was fitted with corrective lenses and she could actually see well, without straining her eyes. She started a reading spree. At least one book a day. The school had a reading contest. The one reading the most books would get an award. She made it. 60 books in 60 days. She read all the classics for the youth. Reading was easy. Writing essays for each book read was what took the longest. But she made it. She got a Kodak camera.
Her mother was concerned that she was not playing like other kids, reading too much. She was forbidden from reading books. She would go to the bathroom and start reading the instructions on shampoo bottles, all the medication descriptions from the medicine cabinet, some newspaper or magazine that someone had forgotten there. Her mom would knock at the door, concerned that I was spending too much time in there. She was concerned for all the wrong reasons.
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