Do you ever have strange dreams?

I sure do, sometimes.

Many times I will wake up and know that I just had the weirdest, strangest dream that anyone could ever imagine, but somehow I am unable to remember a single specific detail from that dream.

Other times, however, I’ll wake up and I can recall every single detail from my strange dream – as though it was a movie that I had seen many times, sitting in my head ready to rewind, play or fast-forward.

These kinds of dreams, for me, are very rare, but I had one the other night and when I woke up I told my wife all about it, expecting her to be impressed.

She wasn’t.

"You’re weird," she said, and just got up to make coffee.

It went like this.

I was not myself in this dream. I was someone else. I was an older man with long white hair and a flowing long white beard.

In this dream, my son was incarcerated in a prison on an island surrounded by cold and choppy ocean waters. There were tall rocky shores visible in the distance.

Being a man of independent wealth, I had no need to work and so each day, I would travel by boat to visit my son.

Visiting hours were from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. each day at this prison, but it took several hours to reach the island by boat.

One day, I saw a small island located near the place where the prison stood.

It dawned on me that if I stayed on that island, I wouldn’t have to travel as far to see my son on my daily morning boat trips.

So the next day, I brought with me a tent and a sleeping bag and instead of returning home after the visit with my son, I simply went to the smaller island, set up camp, and read from a book until sundown when I went to sleep. The next morning, I travelled by boat for the daily visit with my son and then returned to the little island I had claimed as my own.

With lots of time to kill in between visits, I slowly started making improvements to my living accommodations on the little island. The tent became a shack, the shack became a small house, and once a week, I would bring supplies from the mainland to enhance my surroundings.

Day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year my little house on the island grew into an enormous mansion because I had spent so much time adding rooms, planting gardens and slowly transforming the place into a world of my own making.

And that’s where the dream ended.

There I was – a rich old man living alone in luxury on an island in a mansion constructed with my own hands through thousands of hours of labor worked in between the only thing that was truly important in my life – the daily short visits with my son.

I don’t know what the dream meant, if anything at all, but I have a few theories.

Maybe, as a father, I’m often frustrated at how little time I get to spend with my children. Perhaps this frustration is at the root of this dream, or maybe, as my wife indicated, it was just the result of my own personal weirdness or a large spicy meal eaten too late at night!

Who knows where our dreams come from?

This is a mystery that we may never fully answer.

One thing I know for sure is that these dreams that often occupy my mind while I sleep will certainly continue to worry, mystify, frighten and sometimes entertain.