A few days after the first time I met little Sullivan, my friend’s baby with Prader-Willi syndrome, I had a dream about her. The next time I saw my friend, I shared the dream with her and she thought for a moment before responding, “I like that.” In case other parents of children with PWS might like it, too, I thought I would share the dream here.
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The dream started out with a tiger walking through a winter forest on a sunny day, snow thick on the ground and weighing down the tree branches. I watched as the tiger would emerge from deep shade into bright shafts of sunlight and then disappear back into dim shade, and marveled at how those orange and black stripes actually do provide good camouflage even in a Siberian forest during winter.
As the tiger once again walked into a sun-filled clearing, the dark and light areas of the scene became more stark and then began a great swirling that a few moments later resolved into an orca leaping out of the ocean, over and over again.
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After a bit, the orca’s breaching began to quicken until it blurred into a spinning yin-yang symbol that then slowed and became an image of little Sullivan. At that point, I woke up.
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Like many people, I often have to ponder my dreams for a while to figure out what they might mean. But not this time, not with this dream. The moment I awoke, I thought to myself -
Because there are tigers and orcas, there is Sullivan.
And because there is Sullivan, there are tigers and orcas.
They are all part of the vast, mysterious dance of life
as it exuberantly experiments with new ways to express itself.
We may not always like the results of life at play,
but because there is Sullivan, there are tigers and orcas,
and because there are tigers and orcas, there is Sullivan.
And so for me, I will always think of Sullivan as a little “Tiger-Orca,” in her own way as wondrous an example of the creative dance of life as a tiger striding through a winter forest or an orca powering itself up out of the water and into the air.