Dreams are pretty strange.

I think I’ve covered that territory in an earlier blog post .

They’re weird…they don’t make any sense.

I kind of like dreams, though.  It’s nice to have something that doesn’t make sense that’s easy to wake up from.

It’s nice to be able to leave something strange behind in the morning.

Last night or very early this morning, I dreamed I found another cheap apartment.

I had some pretty strange living conditions before I got married and we had our children.

When you’re actively looking for the “cheapest”, sometimes you get exactly what you pay for.

In this dream, I’d found a place that rented for, if I remember correctly, about 65 dollars a month.

We have a dirt floor crawl space under our porch and I think the apartment in my dream was kind of like that…except it had a higher ceiling and a door that was easier to lock.

It had a curtain that covered the dirt side wall, and it looked like it had been freshly painted sometime in the past.

One small room…I don’t remember a bathroom….and now that I think about it, I don’t remember a kitchen, either.

It did have a light bulb…so I guess I could see at night…but I don’t remember much about it that was very nice.

I don’t remember a window.

But, man, it was cheap.

It was a place to hang my knapsack…stack some clothes…it even had a corner where I could put my library books. It was big enough for me and the tiny bed that was included in the monthly rent.

In my dream, I was kind of excited.

I’m not even sure what country it was in.

The dream was kind of a combination of “House Hunters International” and the worst expression of my tendency to be a cheapskate.  It really could have been anywhere.

It could have been just about any family’s crawl space.

No…that’s too creepy.  It could have been a cheap one-room apartment just about anywhere. Forget the crawl space angle.

I haven’t lived like that for a while now.  I’m glad.

When you have a family, you want things to be a couple of steps up from a third-world existence if you can swing it.

You want it to be nicer than “not so nice”.

I do love seeing the hopeful aspects of weird situations.  I love trying to figure out how to make something that’s maybe a little “non-traditional” nicer.

Robert Schuller used to call that aspect of our personalities being a “possibility thinker”. I always appreciated that.

“Possibility Thinker”.

When we were first married, we bought a house that was gutted,  and spent the first couple of years getting it back up to speed.

I remember that first winter, bare tin roof and rafters, no insulation yet. That was kind of hard.

It was like camping in a hard-walled tent.

You don’t want to be camping like that all winter with a newborn in the family.

That was our reality that first year.

It wasn’t a dream that we could wake up from.

But it was a good dream to imagine the possibilities of a wreck of an old country house.

It was a good waking dream to think that things could be better in a place that seemed close to “too far gone”.

I’ve grown out of “cheap apartments” and the dreams of inexpensive places to live.

That’s a part of my life that I’m glad is behind me.

I wouldn’t trade my family for all the cheap apartments in the world.

I like being awake.