I dreamed that I was rescuing a baby (or really just taking her home) from the programming lab

 

The programmers, a bunch of tech geeks who’d been tasked with the project, let me right through. 

Though I remember that it took me a long while to find the room where they were holding her, once I found her, all I had to do, to get her out of there, was ask. It was unusual, they said, for a mother to interrupt the programs.

The young man in charge of her 'case' was accommodating.

 

He was no more than 30 - a little bit chubby, black curly hair that needed a trim, glasses, and wore a white lab coat unbuttoned, over a button down light blue plaid shirt and jeans.

 

And he talked constantly, the whole time that I was working. “You’ll have to take her out,” he’d said. “We're not allowed.”

 

And so I was the one to open the lid of her …. 'case'. It was a metal sort of pod - and I was expecting to find a cradle and her inside but instead, I found, a rectangular packing box with three thin layers of pink styrofoam at the top, which I lifted and handed to him, one at a time.

 

In the layer below the pink styrofoam, there was a layer that was more like… skin… and it was pierced with several tiny needles - a dozen or so, each threaded with a bit of colorful floss. I had to pull the needles out - carefully - in order to free the layer. Once I'd done that, the layer released into my hands.

 

With each layer I lifted, I expected to find the baby but there would be another layer - more pink styrofoam and more skin-like layers, and the deeper I went, the more needles there were to pick out with my fingers.

 

And deeper in, the colorful floss was longer, and running a low-grade current.

 

I noticed that each layer seemed to be about something specific - it had a purpose, which I intuitively understood - and perhaps this is how I was able to navigate the laboratory, and find her in the first place. As the young man had told me, “Mothers never come here.”

 

After going through something like 8-12, or maybe 20 layers I realized, too late, that I should have counted but by then, my horror was mounting as I knew, from the things the young man was saying, that the baby, my daughter, was in there under all of this.

 

And I had to get her out.

 

As I reached the last layer, it was different. Encrusted with bigger needles, and several electronic components which alerted me that this was the motherboard.

 

And here my systems background came in handy, for I had to pull a large parallel processor cable and two memory chips to release that last layer - to release her, for as I lifted it away, there she was.

 

She was fast asleep, wrapped in a layer of transparent plastic. Her baby skin was pink and new, her eyes closed, her perfect little face serene.

 

As I reached for her, the man said, “Now, remember, you may not get any sleep anymore. When I woke my daughter she cried all night and slept all day.”

 

“I don’t mind,” I said, reaching. “I don’t care about the sleep.” For I realized, even that statement in his endless talking was more of the programming. He was trying to program ME to fear my own daughter - to leave here there with him after all.

 

He said, “We don’t know what will happen to her now - as you’re interrupting the program. As you wake her, she is in the middle of a story where she is walking, all alone while a crowd of people is ignoring her or saying things to let her know she is not like them.”

 

“What!!???” I said, truly alarmed. “How could you… ?”

 

He held up his hands. “You don’t understand!” he said. “The next program tells her she is beautiful and loved and it teaches her the way to be - the behaviors she can use to make that happen.”

 

“What!!!???” I said, for even then I was still realizing what this was -and what they were doing to these children. “Give her to me!” I commanded.

 

And he stepped back.

 

And I peeled the last dream layer, the plastic, from her face and then her body/my daughter came into my arms, heavy and warm and real.

 

She was still sleeping, and would be groggy for a while, he told me. From the programming. But she was fine - she would be okay now. We would both be okay.

 

Looking back, I can see that with all of that talking, endless background noise, the programmer had been trying to explain how it all worked. He was telling me a secret - and after all, hadn't he said that he'd awakened his own daughter? Who would understand more what was going on - and what this was, than he - the one tasked with maintaining it all?

 

(He was a whistle blower, wasn’t he?

Helping me to liberate the baby.)

 

Still, even so, I could see that he still believed that THEY were in charge - of the lab, of all of this. In charge of us. But I knew - and THEY certainly knew - the truth: I am in charge.

 

That's why they fear me -and why they took my daughter - but I am free now. I no longer fear them.

----

This is where I woke up.

And as I woke, and as it moved through me, I began to understand:

I’m in charge.

And even those words are layered with meaning.

 

I'm in charge.

I'm 'in' charge - plugged into the flow, and charged with energy.

I understood that I can say what I want to happen and that is exactly what will happen - as long as I hold the 'charge'. As long as I can hold my attention on the dream - the program, the story - that I choose. Another way of saying this, as long I allow the charge which is moving through me to move me.

 

And if I do not falter under their needles of distraction and memory, that story will form around me.

 

I’m just a beginner.

In the specificity layer - I have much to learn.

 

But I am skilled at the vision layer. I understand naming and holding the dream inside the name. I understand the story layer and how resting beneath the others, it gives rise to the world.

 

And so I walked through the house this morning, naming the story that I prefer and letting it rise.

 

And so, as I walked, I released any concern about the story I am leaving behind. Those layers are no longer weighing me down. I leave those layers behind in the LAB.