David McElroy

I knew Laura had a 6-year-old daughter, but I didn’t know the details. At dinner tonight, she told me her story.

“I never had any emotional connection with her father,” she said. “He’s a decent man and he tries to be in her life, but there was never any feeling between us. I was always just desperate for attention from a man — so I kept getting it however I could.”

Laura is 28 now. She’s a strikingly attractive blue-eyed blonde with a successful career in management. But she admitted to me tonight that she has always tried to find something that was missing from her life.

“When I was little, my daddy told me that I was a mistake,” she said. “I was an accident. They didn’t want me. My mom admitted it was true, but it mostly affected me with my dad, especially since he had another ‘accident’ a year after me with another woman. I craved his attention and couldn’t get enough to make me feel like I was loved. So when teen-age boys started wanting me, that was my way to feel loved. I kept looking for more and more — but I never found what I was looking for.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own pursuit of “more.” Laura’s ways of pursuing something more was different than my ways have been, but our motivations haven’t been so different — and this is more common in our society than any of us like to believe.

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What if you knew a secret that the rest of the world needed to know? What if you could change lives with this knowledge? Would you share it with others?

Of course you would. If you saw a tornado coming, any normal person would warn others. If you knew of any danger which others couldn’t yet see, you would almost certainly do everything in your power to raise an alarm. You would tell others what was coming — and you’d warn them to escape the danger.

But what if others didn’t want to hear your warning? What if you knew that others wouldn’t listen? What if you realized they wouldn’t take you seriously — that they might even call you crazy?

If you had that knowledge in your mind — but you found that people around you wouldn’t listen — would you doubt yourself? Would you wonder whether you’re crazy? Would you throw your hands up in frustration and maintain a sullen silence — even though the coming storm seemed painfully obvious to you?

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There was nothing especially noteworthy about the dream. I was married and we had a couple of children. I’ve had variations of this dream for years. It always takes place at a home which I don’t actually know, although the house differs at times.

For almost seven years, it was always the same woman when I had such dreams, at least in the ones in which I recognized someone. At other times, I couldn’t say who she had been. But it was always either this particular woman or a generic unknown woman. Until last weekend.

For the first time in a long time, the wife in my dream was a woman I used to know pretty well. Marie was a tall and beautiful Czech woman who lives in Prague. She was still in grad school when I first met her online years ago. She was smart and we had similar values.

I still remember the first time she called me on the phone as she rode a train home from her university. I was attracted to her and she was attracted to me.

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