Within our subconscious lies a minefield of pensive regret, fears, sorrow and helplessness that our conscious mind thrusts deep below, in the knowledge that we must surmount those emotions, otherwise how can we proceed with life?

Those concerns and those fears rise from time to time, dredged up from the safe confines of the deep mind and memory to surface in dreams we often call nightmares, but are really somewhere in between both. As it was with me several nights ago with vividly seen and felt but now seldom thought of incidents of the past that come knocking on the subconscious vault of memories.

Our granddaughter speaks often with me about her apprehensions but her determination to leave home, to follow her instincts that tell her attendance at a university far, but yet not too far from home will guide her to her future. She has had several acceptances to the universities of her first and second choice, having applied to no fewer than five to ensure she wouldn't be left behind, but pleased to have been accepted by at least one of her first choices.

Attending that university will take her from rural life which she quite detests, living on the near outskirts of a fairly large city, to the largest city in Canada to attend university there. She will be living in residence, so there is some assurance there. And she will be following in the footsteps of her two uncles who migrated there as well for the same purpose, though not her mother who attended academia closer to home.

She sent links to me through her email account to give me an idea of the kind of accommodation available to her. She had just gone through the process of completing applications to her first and second choice of living accommodation on campus, after having discussed them with her mother and me.

And it was these things that apparently triggered those strange dreams for me. On the surface we applaud her determination and decision to pursue an undergraduate degree that will fit in nicely with her longer-term and larger professional choice, to study law. We're glad for her, and we're committed to financing this years-long venture leading to a satisfying professional future for her.

We do have some concerns with respect to her well-being, on her own and studying away from home, her exposure to the larger world, to the social and political circumstances she will find herself in. She is not yet 18, young and we hope, not too vulnerable, since she is practical and given to bookishness with a healthy outlook on life tinctured with a fair degree of skepticism, but a hearty helping of the perception of justice.

I dreamed of our children when they were her age, so many decades ago, preparing to leave home to attend university, and my quiet and silent panic at seeing them go, the empty feeling of their not being immediately present any longer, and how I would manage to cope with my loss and their expanding freedom. I did, and they did, but the pain of that inevitable separation obviously lingers, abiding deep beneath my immediate awareness.