As many of you know, I recently retired from the NYPD. It’s a major life change. It’s not just a change in what I do every day, it’s a change in WHO I am. Being a Police Officer isn’t just a job, it’s a career with a particular lifestyle.

This summer I had a few dreams representing a major change in life. The type that no matter how you tried to interpret the dream, it was telling you that change was coming. It was both satisfying and boring at the same time. I knew a life change was coming, I didn’t need wacky dreams to confirm it.

But an odd thing appeared in my dreams, my gun. I don’t remember ever having a dream with my gun in it before this summer. In these dreams, the gun served as a form of protection for myself.

A few days after I retired I had a dream, I didn’t remember the dream, but I remember acknowledging not having a gun in my dream.

Sometimes dreams seem like a great mystery, but they’re really just our subconscious talking at night. They don’t tell us anything we don’t already know, they just tell it in a different way. But they are reflections of what we go through during the day. They help us cope with life, and they sometimes tell us when we’ve completed a change in our lives.