Toby the lost zebra is found

Dreams are strange. Some people remember every tiny detail of a dream and wake up feeling as if they have been dreaming the same dream all night long and others swear that they never dream.

I have read that everyone, infact, does dream and that remembering dreams is a good memory enhancer further saying the more you remember your dreams the more exercise your brain will do which means it will boost your skills in remembering things and avoid memory gaps.

You may not think you dream because after each cycle of sleep, your brain erases dreams that occurred in that sleep cycle. That's most likely why most people only remember one dream during the night.

Some of my dreams are so puzzling and I wonder where in the world my mind was during the night and some seem so real that I question in the morning if those things really happened to me.

Why do we dream?

Some researchers say that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being.

I had one the other night that was strange and had a strange real life ending.

I was dreaming of horses. One horse jumped through a fence into an area where there was large hill of dirt. The horse climbed onto the hill.

In my dream I mentioned to Marissa that it reminded me of the little zebra in a children's book I used to read to my kids that slept in a pile of coal dust and in the morning the zebra was all black, resembling a little black horse. And in my dream she said with excitement that she remembered that book and how much she liked it.

Why did I even bring that book into my dream - an old book that was kept at my dad's house and read only when we went to visit him. I am sure I read it to my nieces and nephews - much older than my kids - when they were young, too. When we moved my dad out of his house I retrieved that book but thought it had probably made its way to the trash over the last 10 years.

I couldn't help thinking of that book all day Saturday - "Toby Zebra and the Lost Zoo" with a copyright of 1963 - and the days of yesteryear.

Sunday, Austin was doing some random cleaning out of some papers and books that he had stashed away in a tote in our storage room and he came walking out to the room I was in holding that book.

"Do you remember this book, mom?" he said.

How incredibly weird is this?

It made me happy that we kept that little book and that he found it (by accident) at this particular time. I sat down and read it to Marissa; she wasn't as thrilled about it as she was when she was a little girl or even as she was in my dream.

I can't even begin to analyze that dream or the end result hut I do know that I am happy that the book was found and though old as it is, I will keep it somewhere special so that I can get it out again someday to read to perhaps another generation.