The Path?

People sometimes talk about a dream they had or a repeated dream they keep having. I wish my dreams were more like everyone else's. Many of my friends will say "oh I had the greatest dream the other night". Not me, all my life my dreams are always bizarre, tortured, prophetic or frightening in ways that no movie could recreate. ............................................... A few weeks ago I had a dream of hiking along a path through rolling, rocky fields, there was actually more stone than field with not a tree in sight. I have never been in such a place, it was not familiar to me. The path was made of small stones, packed down from years of people following the trail. As I walked, the path slowly was taking me to higher ground, suddenly I could see someone at the top of a hill. It looked like he was sitting on either a crumbling stone fence or perhaps a wall. Even though I was some distance away, I thought he looked familiar, I couldn't quit place him but I felt we had met before. Walking up the hill, he never looked at me, I wasn't sure if it was because he couldn't see me, maybe I wasn't really there or maybe he didn't want to see me. As I approached he still was looking off into the distance, I realized he was waiting for me to get closer, I could also tell that he seemed annoyed with me. Stopping a few feet from him, I stood in silence, waiting for him to speak. I heard him sigh and he turned towards me, that's when I saw who he was and why he seemed familiar. It was my younger self, it was me, he finally spoke asking, "at what point did you give up on yourself"? That startled me awake. ............................................. After a dream like that, it made me wonder about self reflection. Could my subconscious be trying to sound the alarm regarding my choices lately, does something like that even exist. I'm certainly not on the path that I had set out to be on. I also am open to choices that at one time would have felt wrong to me. I got the feeling from that young man that he was not only annoyed with me but disappointed in me as well. Did I give up on myself, looking back I wonder if I ever really believed in myself in the first place. Some days I want to go back to that young man and tell him that he will learn things are not so black and white, he will learn about something in between called grey. Maybe that's the stubborn adult problem however, maybe he's right, maybe we need to step back and see when the path we are following is not correct, the "point" is when we didn't notice we went off course.