Last night I had the strangest dream. Which is saying something, for me, as my dreams are frequently vivid and peculiar.

My birthday is coming up, and so in the dream I was surprised with a birthday party. The theme? Rubber duckies.

There was a big dance floor that was filled with a huge inflatable duck and countless balloons in white and clear and silver and blue to look like soap bubbles. People were having so much fun dancing and bouncing the balloons around! And as I was taking all of this in, my friend handed me a gift and it turned out to be the most perfect, most exquisite rubber ducky I’d ever seen. It rendered me speechless. It was what I’d always wanted.

…I’m in my mid-thirties.

Here’s the thing. Yes, I am a grown-ass woman who’s about to be 36. But, trauma can sort of “freeze” parts of you in your psyche at the ages in which those traumatic experiences occurred. So, while I’m almost 36, there are pieces of my mind and body and soul that aren’t 36 at all. There’s a 19-year-old me in there still reeling from an abusive relationship in college. There’s an 11-year-old me in there still feeling lost in space after her father abandoned her. And so on. People talk about the idea of their inner child; it’s sort of like that, but a deeper dive into our inner selves beyond just feeding cravings of nostalgia. I’ve written more about this idea here.

Clearly in my subconscious mind, there’s a very young version of me that came out to play in my dreams last night. I’ve learned that at times when seemingly discordant things come up — feelings, or thoughts, or questions, or even dreams, which don’t seem to be related to what’s going on in present day — that’s a time when I need to pay close attention to what that discordant information is trying to convey. This rubber ducky thing seems really random, but, it very likely is not. I need to do a little reflecting to consider what my subconscious is trying to tell me. I suspect there’s some sense of neglect that I need to address, because the overarching feeling I remember from the dream is how seen I felt, how it was, for once, truly all I wanted. It wasn’t inaccurate either; I’ve always, always had a love for rubber duckies that I never really grew out of. It probably started with Ernie and his beloved ducky on Sesame Street. I had always loved Ernie and his ducky, and I’d wanted one just like his; indeed, in the dream, that was the ducky I was given. I had a small collection of duckies as a kid, though those are long gone now. While I don’t know that I feel inclined to start a new collection of them, this year at school in my art classes I’ve started to use rubber duckies for a classroom management tool.

I know in my heart that this dream wasn’t really about rubber duckies, though; it was about feeling seen, and that’s what I’ve truly wanted for my entire life.

I am sure that most people brush off strange dreams as nothing more than that. Maybe they’re in denial or maybe that works for them. I’m not here to judge. You do you! But I know my brain well enough by now to know that nothing taps out at surface level. Maybe it’s a lot like an actual duck, seemingly calm and serene on top but constantly paddling and kicking along down below.

Quack quack.

P.S. Special shout-out to the friend in the dream who made all that happen inside my head — not because of the duckies (although, what fun!), but because you make me feel seen, and that apparently echoes down into the depths of my soul. I hope to always do the same for you!