Was It All Just a Dream?

At the same time tonight, my daughter and I were both thinking about the things she'd done this summer, and how, when she wakes up tomorrow, she will not be doing any of them. Her thought was, "Did it really begin and end already?" Mine was, "Did it really happen, or was it all just a dream?"
 
I feel as though our brains are built to fill the gap as we move from one thing to the next. (I say this not from a scientific angle, but purely from an observational one). If that were not the case, how would we survive all the heartaches and changes and tragedies that we endure in life? How could we not be stopped in our tracks every day by the successes and failures of our most recent endeavor? So, does our psyche just knit things back together as our skin does when a cut heals?
 
For my daughter, the anticipation of her summer activities lasted so long, she couldn't help but feel that the activities themselves went quickly. For me, they join so many things in my life that have been all-consuming (for short times or long), but that somehow vanish once they are over. Moving on, REALLY moving on, takes allowing that knitting back together, to a place where you're not quite sure if things were real or a dream. You know, of course, from pictures and notes, that what you remember was real, yet your view of events is covered in that film of dreams. And that's what lets you "wake up" and look forward.
 
I didn't dream my daughter's summer (or my part in it) any more than I dreamed my many years at ABC. But in both cases, allowing the events to become part of what WAS lets me move on with what IS, not by forgetting, but by putting the experiences into their place as memories.
 
Before we know it, the whole summer will be behind us, all of it moving into the memory category. I think there's a pretty good chance we'll consider this summer a good dream. A good dream, and a good place from which we can move on.