I am about to share with you a dream that I had last night.
I didn’t really remember it, upon starting my day. I had vague recollections of waking in the night at some point to go pee, and thinking as I did so that an important dream had just been dreamt.
As I readied myself for work, Andrew asked me how I slept:
“I slept well, and deeply.” I replied.
“Did you dream?” he inquired.
“I did, but I don’t remember any details. Only feelings.” I did not elaborate on what feelings those were. I wasn’t actually even sure I knew, myself.
I cannot recall what it was that happened this morning, as I worked, which triggered the full content of my dream to come flooding back in; however, it felt like my heart simultaneously imploded and exploded as this occurred.
I swear to you, as I live and breathe, that what you read below is not an embellishment; I have not retroactively dramatized this experience. I know it may sound too scripted, too cinematic, or even just too emotional to be real.
But this dream was real.
I was visiting my parents in Huntsville, standing in the kitchen of the house in which I was raised. I had just come downstairs after waking–wearing only underwear (pulled on for modesty before leaving the bedroom, as usual)–and was talking to my parents as I made my coffee. My Father sat across the kitchen table from where I stood; my Mother sat in the kitchen chair nearest the hallway. We were discussing something relatively mundane, in the vaguely argumentative fashion which was often the default for our interactions.
My Father, with his arms crossed, clucked disapprovingly over something I’d just said. Before he could say anything more, my Mother (in the tone I heard her take countless times with my Father in these situations) cut him off with his name: “Fred“…
This was the moment when lucidity crept in. Somehow, this felt as if it were simultaneously a slowly growing awareness and an electric bolt of realization, and I instantaneously began crying.
“Steven, what’s wrong?” my Mother asked, concerned.
For a split second, my thought process went bicameral: what was wrong? Why was this garden-variety, mild conflict between me and my parents upsetting me so badly, today? Yet at the same time, I opened my mouth to speak; knowing even as words stammered out of my mouth and through the tears, that I had just eaten from The Tree Of Knowledge.
“I just realized that I must be dreaming,” I sobbed. “Because you’re both dead.”
As I said this I dove into my Mother’s arms, certain of what would happen next, with the spell broken. And as if in slow motion–although it happened impossibly fast, in real time–I watched my Mother transform from the brightly-dressed, vivacious redhead that she was while still healthy, into the withered, white-haired husk who I had hugged for the last time in December 2008, barely more than two weeks before her death. Perhaps even more impossibly, in the same moment that this transformation took place, the kitchen chair morphed first into a wheelchair, and then into the hospice bed on which she drew her final breath.
I felt all of the desperation, helplessness, guilt, grief, and pain of that last embrace, for barely a heartbeat…then I was standing alone in the kitchen, and the lights were off, and the sun had not yet come up.
I trudged methodically back up the stairs, to my childhood bedroom, and opened the door. My bedroom was just as it had been when I was 16: the record player with a night-light glowing beneath it, my desk, television, and 8-bit Nintendo console, and my tiny twin-sized bed…in which Andrew was peacefully sleeping.
“Wake up, baby,” I solemnly whispered, “it’s time for us to go.”
Then, I lifted the covers slightly to slip into the bed next to him for just a moment, and hold him close to me. As I did so, the twin bed became the full-sized bed in which Andrew and I actually sleep.
And then, I woke up, laying in bed beside Andrew, just as I had been a moment before.
You have the feeling of receiving a message or revelation directly from a source? This very personal to you so please see my observations as more general statements and not as specific directives: 1. Dreams are not hallucinations as they are not projected or perceived as coming from outside of you. 2. Not all dreams are symbolic of anything – this one is quite literal as it is not seeking to be interpreted but may be a more direct request to do or simply remember something important to you, what that is only you can determine. 3. Just because it’s a powerful dream doesn’t make it ominous.
Beautiful and powerful. I had similar dreams after my mom died. I feel like she came to visit me as yours did you.
Steven . . . I can relate in part to your dream because I’ve had similar and on the same theme. In my case the only difference is that my dream was a conscious projection of my knowing my one surviving parent would soon pass away. I was “aware” of being in a dream and that in reality this had not happened yet but in my dream I was in a moment where it was recent history. My emotional reaction was to reject this knowledge and wake up. When I relayed my dream to my mother she told me not to worry and yet six months later she passed away.