Those Old Return Nightmares Return

"So, it had been a while since I had a dream where I was consecrated. Last night, I dreamt that I was an ex-consecrated and attending a YFE or some sort of reunion event with all sorts of consecrated and legionaries. All the directors and people kept looking at me and knowing I did not belong. In the dream, it was my Mom's plan to go to the event because she wanted to show off her two consecrated daughters. (My sister had also been consecrated in my dream.) What upset me about the dream was that I had this happy contented feeling the whole way through. It's like my psyche constantly reminds me that I thought I would be happy as a consecrated. The reality was not contentment - it was anxiety, loneliness, and depression. I hate those dreams, though, because it takes a while to remind myself that my dream of consecrated life did not come true and I am no longer consecrated, nor dreaming that. Which makes it painful to wake up every morning I have that dream."

From M. at The Lotus Point Blog

Dreaming my dreams with you...

From Married to the Church
An Unfinished Story
This is my recurring dream: I have decided to leave the seminary--I want out. But in the dream, it's mid-September or October, another academic year has begun, and I 'm still in the seminary. In the dream, I don't know why I'm still there. I'm already married (or divorced and remarried--the dream varies in its currency), already teaching American literature at Indiana University, I have two children--but I'm still in the seminary. I have the anxious sense of another year slipping away. But just as I don't know why I'm still there, I also don't know how to escape. I wake up squirming.
I have been having this dream two or three times a year for the last twenty-seven years, eve since I did, in fact, leave in 1966, after eight years of high school and college at St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee and a year of theology at Catholic Univeristy in Washington....
When I finished [the story], seven classmates stood up and said that they had had, and continued to have, essentially the same dream.

Sound familiar?

Thanks for the link, P.S.