This has nothing to do with Guinness (or does it?)

My daughter Karin put a link on her blog today to a comical blog titled “Waking up on the wrong side,” written by a friend who is also adopting from Vietnam. She began by asking if you have ever had one of “those dreams…You know, one of those dreams that just ruins your whole day from the moment you wake up? One of those dreams that manages to evoke emotions which then carry over into your waking hours, and, even though you know it was just a dream, you can’t shake the feeling with which it left you.” Her dream/nightmare caused her to lose her Vietnamese adoption because she had blogged about elves (which she had not done in wakeful life). I also had a nightmare last week that resulted in losing the adoptions. It went on and on all night, carried on through the day, and I am still thinking about it a week later. Here it is –

Karin and Kevin vanished. Someone had an inkling that relatives who are not in contact with the family had kidnapped them. No one knew where they lived exactly, but someone suspected that they were near Ottawa in a rural area. Since there was no mother in the Faulkner home, the Vietnamese adoptions were lost. Out of loneliness and grief, Steve had to leave their house for his sanity and moved in with friends as a boarder.

After we had been mourning for eight long months, Grant and I decided to try to find these elusive relatives who might know of Karin and Kevin’s whereabouts. We drove through the countryside and eventually found a remote house which seemed deserted. The door was open. The house had a sense of being a commune. It was a decent home, yet, where a fireplace had been, there was a gaping hole in the wall.

Karin and Kevin were there. They were zombies. The joy had been sucked out of them. I wasn’t sure they even recognized us. Amazingly, Steve showed up minutes after we had arrived! Simultaneously, we had all decided to begin searching on our own. The expression on Steve’s face from receiving no reaction from his loved ones was heartbreaking. Eventually, they warmed up enough to show us the room where they spent most of their days – a closet with a table and two chairs. There were forced to study philosophy in this room day after day.

Eventually, their captors appeared. We did not have much conversation with them, and I was unsure how we were going to persuade Karin and Kevin to leave with us. That was the waking up point which I came to repeatedly throughout the night. Each time, there was Guinness snuggled up to me seemingly trying to offer comfort.