I have had a recurring dream since I was at school. It isn’t what I would call a nightmare but it does cause me some anxiety and I still to this day don’t know what it may symbolise.

It starts with me, in some kind of costume, stage left and waiting in the wings for my prompt…. To enter onto the stage, from out of the shadows ….to stand in front of the bright lights and the audience….realising that rehearsals are over and now it is time to play my part in the real thing.

But, for many years, in my dream, what happened next was that there was just silence. Deathly silence. And it slowly dawns on me whilst I am standing there, that I have not rehearsed at all….I have not learnt my lines and now an audience is waiting….my fellow actors are waiting…..what am I going to do? My heart starts pounding and I have tingles of anxiety from top to toe. I bite my lip, I try to focus. I look down and realise I have the script in my hand but I don’t know what page we are on  or what I am supposed to say next. Everyone is looking at me. People want me to say something and I freeze.

Most of the time, this is when the dream ended as I woke up but the dream and its effect would stay with me for most of the day.

I am coming up to 45 now (I expect a fair few people my age follow that with “I can’t quite believe it”).  An observation has been that since I turned 40, I found myself growing in confidence in life in general. More grey hair? Yes! More fine lines? Yes! BUT! The gift of the 4^th decade of my existence….more confidence!  I say “more” because I don’t think I am completely confident; I have some way to go. But I am shedding that pang of pain that used to accompany me with everything I did that was even slightly out of my comfort zone. I would never let that pang stop me from doing something I really wanted to do, but it did its best to try and disable me on every occasion. As I stopped trying to ignore this pain and developed ways of confronting and diminishing it, I reversed some kind of vicious cycle and this enabled me to grow.

So much so that what happened was this; the ending to my recurring dream changed. The circumstances were the same; lack of preparation, bright lights, initial anxiety. But this time, I decided to just ad lib! I decided in my mind that; I could be entertaining, funny, expressive and creative and I would just go out there and throw something out there and see where it landed. After that, I would quickly find my place in the script, learn as much as I could as quickly as I could and everything would work out in the end.

And here I am, writing my first blog, late to the party and very green! I feel just the same as I did on that stage; vulnerable, anxious with anticipation, second guessing the audience’s appraisal. What if it is a ‘flop’? What if?…what if?….what if I just threw myself out there and let the words and thoughts lay where they fall? And I hope that by being honest, open and real I will make that connection with my audience, entertain them, inspire them and send out a little hope. That’s my new dream and it starts here.