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."