Her Death Came to Me in a Dream
1. “Dreams are stories and images that our minds create while we sleep. They can be entertaining, fun, romantic, disturbing, frightening, and sometimes bizarre.” Dreams can also be healing, a visit from beyond, a warning, a vision of the future.
Of all the mysteries in life, for me, dreams are near the top of the list of mysterious wonders. I love dreams and use a variety of techniques in analyzing my own dreams depending on what type of dream it is and where I am at in my personal life.
When I catch a dream, meaning when I’m able to grab the essence of the dream and pull it from the ethers of sleep and onto the paper as I am waking, it is truly a magnificent thing. There is something about the haziness of waking and jotting down the words quickly before it evaporates that creates a mysterious, almost poetic sounding story.
Through the years, as my intuition and instinctual nature have developed, I have had some profound death dreams. In the dream, I know a person has died. It doesn’t happen often nor does it happen with everyone I know but when it does happen – it’s important and powerful.
What I am about to tell you is a story about the death dream of my Mother.
She had had cancer for over a decade. Her health was frail from the ravages of the disease and she had been hospitalized so many times before, blood infections, new emergences of cancer, and many more side effects from sharing her life with the big “C”. But her spirit was like a bed of nails. Tough, unbendable, her will to live out numbered the statistics. She proved over and over again that she defied being a number and was still living to tell about it.
I was living in Nevada and she in Chicago, so when my Sister called to tell me that the doctor recommended that it was time for Hospice. I was surprised yet not surprised letting the shock of it wrap around me. Surprised at the finality of the news; yet trying to strike a bargain with the surreal silence that connected us hundreds of miles apart. I found it difficult to find words. I assured myself mentally, this is usually what happens when someone has a terminal illness. A few days later, it might have even been a week or so later, my Sis called me. “I’m going to hold the phone to Mom’s ear. I thought you would like to talk to her.” It was really our goodbye talk, not at all how I had imagined it would be at the end. Her voice was thin and gravely. What do you say to someone who is dying, when easing into the conversation, making small talk about the weather feels watered down and insignificant. I finally managed to find the words, “I hear they are treating you special like the queen you’ve always been.” She chuckled weakly, the same laugh I had known always, just fainter, softer, faded.
That night she came to me in a dream. I was in the kitchen and when I turned towards the counter she was standing, leaning back against it. It was like being in a video, shot in a 1960’s kitchen. She was young, vital, alive her hair swept into a French roll. I said, “where have you been? I’ve tried calling you and you wouldn’t answer.” She moved towards me and wrapped her arms around me. It felt like she was melting into me. Was she taking me with her? My emotions became confused, and I awoke startled. It was like a dull, silent knowing that dropped into my gut. I knew she had died. I got the text the next morning from my sister that she had passed. That was over 10 years ago and the dream is still as sharp and clear as the day my children were born.
There are some things that do not fade with time, and this is one of them for me. The death dreams are different from other dreams. I do not analyze them but instead drink them in, let them settle, look for messages that might be hidden and read them like tea leaves. It is a subtle, nuanced process that can only be seen with the inner seeing and heard with the inner hearing which is also called intuition or our instinctual nature.