Young man at the building site

This dream took place the night of Sept. 7, 1994, my birthday, and 8 weeks after our son died.
I was with a group of people at the building site of a house. We were being threatened by a young man with a gun. There was a screen set up on the side of a hill, like a tall fence. The young man was on one side of the screen and we were on the other side. I was trying to hide from him. Somehow the conflict was resolved and we continued working at building the house, the young man helping us. During the course of the dream the tension centered around the young man eased. At the end of the dream he and I were sitting on a bench, arm-in-arm.

At first when Gabe was in dreams he was not immediately recognizable. In early dreams he had a great deal of difficulty accepting his death, as he seems to have in this dream. The image of a curtain or thin veil between the livng and those who have passed over also appeared in a number of my dreams, as did the theme of construction. In this case we are all trying to grow spiritually and construct new understanding and new lives after his death. At the end of the dream Gabe and I are much like we were when together in life.

Two birds

This dream took place in Buffalo, NY where my son was living when he was killed. He and I were on opposite sides of a fence. We spoke but I couldn't be sure that we really were. Then I had to cross a hazardous parking lot. That's when I realized someone had given him a container just before he died. It remember seeing the design of two birds on it.

I was never able to understand this dream. Over a year later, though, we were in Buffalo. There were a number of dreams between this one and when we went to Biffalo which seemed to be eerie premonitions of what was to come.

Over time I got used to speaking with Gabe in dreams, even though our lips never moved.

Suggestion....

Someone e-mailed me with the following suggestion...

To fully develop your abilities for useful dream interpretations, I'd strongly recommend your becoming familiar with the work at the Percept Institute. http://www.theperceptinstitute.com/mainframeset-1.htmA workshop with these people would be a revealing way-point on your journey as well as enhancing your ability to assist others. They teach a method of owning your thoughts & dreams in a way which makes them very useful in one's personal journey.

If you visit the site, or are familiar with Percept Institute, please let me know what you think.

Rich

Neil's Visit- Judy's Dream

The Visit: July 5, 2002

I am following my son, Neil, into an unknown country. He stops at the border and explains that he is going into the country to find his brother who is missing. The border guards look at his papers and let him through. I am invisible. There is no sense of portent about this although I understand that Scott is missing somewhere in this unknown terrain that feels like somewhere in the Middle East. I feel comforted that Neil is still concerned for his brother, even tho’ Neil is now dead.

I follow him through narrow, winding, cobbled streets, outdoor markets, crowded squares. He seems to know that I am there behind him but he is on a mission. He seems confident.

Eventually we leave the village behind and are on a narrow dirt path/trail. He stops to have his lunch. He sits on one side of the path and opens his lunch. I sit facing him on the other side of the path. He looks at me and smiles. His whole being seems to radiate. He looks into my eyes unwaveringly and says “If anyone had told me 2 or 3 years ago that I would be in the place I am, I would never have believed them”.

What is this dream about?

This dream for me is clearly a visitation. This rarely happens in dreams, but I’m convinced Neil came to me to tell me that he is okay and happy where he is.

The dream took place the morning that I was leaving to fly to Calgary, Alberta, and from there take a trip in a helicopter with one of the men who evacuated Neil’s body from the Wapta Ice Fields. The friend who was taking me to the airport awakened me just at the end of the dream.

This dream tells me that Neil is still in the family, that he still cares for Scott and is still a part of the struggles that Scott deals with in his life. Neil was Scott’s best friend and during his life was very concerned for him. I am hugely comforted to believe that Neil is still here, a part of our family, and someone who remains with us around family crises.

The unknown country is where Neil is (for me) and I believe that this dream came to me to help me accept that Neil does not struggle with knowing whether he is alive or dead. When Neil died and his body was up in the mountain for 8 days, I was tortured that he might not know he was dead. I don’t know where this came from, but it was very real to me, and lasted until I had this dream (so almost 3 months). I would talk to him every day and tell him what I knew about what had happened, why they couldn’t get his body out right away, weather conditions, etc. Because the weight of his pack caused him to go over the edge head first, he was unconscious very quickly, and I was terrified that he didn’t know he was dead. I had this need to help him understand that he was dead so that he could find peace. Not because I have a particular belief in the afterlife (I still believe it is a mystery and should remain so), but because I was driven to connect with him and love does very peculiar things.
Again we have the road/path/journey. It’s significant that he is on one side of the road and I on the other. We don’t touch in the dream, and awake I remember clearly that we are in separate countries – we didn’t sit down side by side as we might have when having a picnic. That we are on opposite sides of a path is fraught with significance.
I went to Calgary, and Lake Louise, and up into the mountain with so much more calm because of this dream, because Neil made it so. The relationship never ends.

Being Driven- Judy's Dream

Being Driven – May 4, 2004

I’m driving to a cabin in the mountains with my childhood friend, Irene. It’s a 4-5 hour drive and we’re driving at night in Ontario. Irene is the driver. I am in the passenger seat and she is in the trunk. I think it’s strange that she is driving from the trunk and that I can’t see her, but I’m not nervous. I feel safe with her driving.

We are close to Toronto and another 1 or 2 hours from the cabin. I am trying to get Irene’s attention to ask if she is tired and suggest we stop, perhaps stay at my sister’s and then continue the next day, but I can’t see her and she apparently doesn’t hear me as I’m not getting an answer.

Now she’s in the driver’s seat but falling asleep. We stop at my cousin Ally’s to call my sister. Her phone has a call box attached to it that must be fed money in advance of the call. When I get through to my sister (older sister) she tells me she and her husband just returned from Florida and there are parcels and luggage everywhere, but if we can clear a space we are welcome to stay. I tell her I’m with Irene who she knows is my childhood friend. But when I arrive at my sister’s home I am actually with a different friend and I feel foolish. How do I explain that I confused Glenda with Irene?
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Making sense of this dream:

I am on a journey, and interestingly a journey to the mountains, tho’ I don’t know of any mountains near Toronto. But Toronto is where I grew up and this dream has a lot to do with family baggage (going back to childhood, hence my childhood friend), and in times of crisis, family baggage has, for most of us, a way of becoming very obvious. My son, Neil, died in the Rocky Mountains and so in some way I am trying to journey to him.

I am not in the driver’s seat – ie: I am not following my own path. I am being driven by an invisible driver who I believe is really my dead son, Neil. It is certainly true that since his death, my only passions have been related to ensuring that he is remembered and some would say that I have been ‘driven’. It makes sense to me then that the focus of my driven-ness is Neil and it is with him or to him that I journey. I am not struggling with who the driver is in this in the dream. I accept that’s where I am and where I need to be. My struggle is more with speaking and being heard in the real world.

There’s a lot in the dream about baggage and communication difficulties – the baggage at my sister’s, having to pay to speak on the phone. There have always been communication problems in my family of origin and a price to be paid for speaking up. Now, since Neil’s death, nobody speaks of him unless I bring him up. They don’t call me on the anniversary of his death or on his birthday like my wonderful, loving friends do. So it feels like in the dream, the baggage/luggage is a barrier to communication.

There is another thing about boxes/containers that comes to mind. These have come up in many of my dreams since Neil’s death (one in particular about a precious chest). The last time I saw Neil he was contained in a box, so boxes sometimes have a very ominous connotation to me, and sometimes (as in the precious chest dream) they have a feeling of great beauty and attraction. In “The Unknown Driver” dream of Rich’s, the “huge, box shaped warehouses that sit glistening white by the bay” were an echo of images in many of my dreams. However, in this dream, they seem to be more about barriers.

In the end, I’m with Glenda, not Irene. Glenda is a friend in the last 20 years of my life. I’m back in the present, standing in my sister’s house, with my childhood baggage of feeling not understood, my sister’s baggage piled up around the living room, creating a barrier. And I think how can we ever communicate if I keep getting it wrong? Here’s where the dream reminds me that I am both of these people – the child in relation to my older, only, sibling, and the adult that feels alone in my journey.

The Unknown Driver

The four-lane highway stretches out in front of us in long, graceful curves as the car glides effortlessly over the road, barely touching the pavement it seems. Nina is sitting in the front passenger seat. I'm directly behind her. We pass huge, box-shaped warehouses that sit glistening white by the docks along the bay. The road rises in an overpass that arcs around the bay spread out before us. The azure water shimmers as if every molecule were alive.
"How beautiful!" I say to Nina. She nods in agreement. A pure white bridge arches over a river. My breath is taken away by the vision of a perfect city cradled on all sides by shoreline.
Then I notice the driver's seat. There's no one behind the wheel! I panic.
"Who's driving?" I ask Nina.
"Don't worry about it," she says. I do worry about it, though. The more I worry, the more the car gets out of control It veers wildly back and forth across lanes suddenly filled with rush-hour traffic. Tires screech, horns scream. The dream ends.

What do you think this dream means?

Climbing the mountain...

Many people liken grieving to climbing a mountain, one you can't go around, one you can't avoid. And I had a number of dreams which reinforced that idea for me. The first occurred a few weeks after our son died. In this dream my wife and I were climbing a mountain together. The going was tough, much of it on our hands and knees. After a long and difficult struggle, we came to a spot where the trail leveled out a bit. We stopped and stared in awe at the range of tall, jagged peaks on the distant horizon. We knew we'd have to get to the other side of those peaks. Nina saw a different trail, one off to the left, which she was sure was a short-cut and easier way to go. She rushed down this path wiith me in pursuit as I urged her to slow down and turn back. Suddenly she came to the edge of a precipice and for a moment teetered dangerously close to falling off. She took my hand and eased her way back. We rested and talked, then returned to our original path.
To me, mountains and other elevated places in my dreams represented the spirit or spiritual goals. I took such dreams to mean that to heal I needed to grow spiritually. This dream in particular told me there were no short-cuts in the grieving process. Whatever we needed to go through, that's what we'd go through. At that time I may have been concerned about Nina's interest in psychic readings, something I thought could cause as much harm or more harm than good.
This dream also vividly depicted what we would be doing in the coming years, struggling together to deal with the loss of our son.

An early dream

Soon after our son died I had lucent dream, meaning that I was aware I was dreaming as I was having the dream. Not at all what I was used to! In the first part of this dream I was pushing two people in wheelchairs down a sidewalk in our neighborhood. It was not easy going, since the walkway was made of stones that came together at uneven heights. We made it around a corner to a bus stop, but when the bus arrived there was no way we could get on. We made our way back home. I discovered the people in the wheelchairs were me and my wife. My interpretation? Our grieving would be very debilitating for us, a great struggle. There'd be things we simply couldn't do, and being part of the mainstream of life would have to wait. For us to work through our grief, I would have to make a great effort.

A Dream uninterpreted......

....... is like a letter unopened.

There was a period in my life, when our children were young, when I dreamed often and remembered my dreams in vivid detail. I would muse about what these strange dreams, filled with imagery and symbolism, could possibly mean. Caught up in the activity of raising a young family, the dreams and their possible meanings eventually became a vague and distant memory.
And so the days, weeks and years went by until all time stopped. That was the day of the phone call all parents dread, the call that tells them their child has died. Suddenly everything became one: reality and unreality, day and night, conscious and subconscious. All was bundled in intolerable pain and a fierce struggle to survive.
From within the troubled sleep of a now grieving parent, dreams once again emerged, more detailed a vivid than ever before. Some were quite confusing, but for many the message was clear. These dreams arrived like letters in the mail, letters to be opened and read, thought about, interpreted and understood.
Some dreams brought home the reality of losing Gabe, at a time when my heart and soul struggled to deny the reality of his death. Others brought messages from a greater source of understanding. And some dreams gave me the chance to spend precious moments with him.
I decided early on to keep a dream journal and interpret these dreams in ways that could help me heal. Hopefully I could take threads of meaning from these dreams and weave a fabric of hope and healing. I hope you can, too. Welcome to "Healing Dreams."