A wierd dream

But then again, when was the last time you had a normal dream.  "So there I was, watching the game, and I needed to go to the bathroom, but I was afraid I would miss an important play.  And my kids didn't want to do their chores just then"

Anyway, the other day I was so happy to wake up and realize that the dream I had been having was just a dream and I could just go downstairs and have coffee.  In my dream, I discovered that Natalie and Akin had been having some wierd and unseemly correspondence in some chatroom or something.

I know where the Natalie side of this dream came from.  Like so many other teenagers, her iPhone all too often appears to be surgically welded to her fingertips, and it is her main portal to the world, to the seeming detriment of her relations to her family members.  Which is not to say that she is so much different from the rest of us and the overwhelming extent to which we seek validation from our little devices.  Facebook likes, blog traffic, texts, etc.  I know that I am all too susceptible to it, and that it is not my best feature.  But with my beloved daughter, yes, there is some concern as to what she may be up to out on the internet.  Yet I don't want to convey mistrust to her by micromanaging and controlling her.  She is fundamentally a good egg, just a teenage one.

I may have mentioned that my friend Katherine told me that she and her husband had instituted a no-screens policy after dinner or something, and that they find themselves sitting on the couch talking more.  I keep meaning to talk to Mary about that, but then I get tied up with whatever I'm doing on my computer.

Getting back to my dream, the Akin part of it was perhaps more disturbing.  First off, there's the problem with him being dead.  Not that the dream part of my brain should care about that. What was really disturbing, I suppose, was the idea that that's the kind of thing he would have been up to. He was a fine human being, albeit one with problems.  I'm sure he got slotted into the dream because Crabill and I had run into his parents after the Carolina game.  At which I needed to go the bathroom, but I was afraid I would miss an important play.