Will You Tell Me Your Dreams?

 

This is a genuine question and invitation – I would love for you to write to me and tell me about your dreams.

I'm especially interested in the dreams that have stayed with you. The ones that helped you understand something in your waking life, or that keep returning again and again.

I’m curious to know how you make sense your dreams. Do you research meanings of symbols? Do you allow meanings to reveal themselves to you? Do you just notice them and not worry about what they mean?

 

What Dreams Taught Me About Being with My Mom During Cancer Treatment

In 2009, my mom took Stage IVB cervical cancer to task. She underwent chemotherapy and aggressive targeted radiation. The treatments were brutal.

I pulled her oncologist aside privately after one of her appointments and asked him to get really real with me. What’s the prognosis? What do I need to be prepared for? He told me, bluntly, that there was an 80% chance she would not survive this cancer. Or, if she did survive it now, that it would eventually be her end.

Seventeen years later, my mom remains cancer-free. So, you know. Sometimes statistics are just numbers. And frankly, my mom has defied the odds so many times that I'm not sure she notices them anymore. She's perhaps a little worse for the wear, but damn. That beautiful old bird is nearly indestructible.

Her treatment plan took place over a few months, and throughout it I was having a series of recurring dreams where my life was at risk. My plane was crashing. My boat was sinking. My car was going off a bridge into water. My train was coming off the tracks.

In all the dreams, these themes were consistent: other people were with me, though they were always strangers to me; death was imminent for all of us; there was mass panic and fear when we realized that we were all about to die.

But then, I’d have this moment of calm and clarity woosh over me. I’d look at whoever was right next to me, and I’d say something like, “So, seems like we’re about to die. How about we sit here calmly and try to focus on love and the good luck that we’re not dying alone.”

The other person always agreed to my proposition, so while everyone else panicked around us, we just sat there, maybe held hands, and just opened ourselves to the inevitable.

And then, amazingly, disaster averted itself, and everyone lived.

I had probably 5-6 of these dreams over the course of as many weeks—it was different disaster each time, but always the same story arc of near death, acceptance, and then surviving—before I realized that this was really about my mom’s cancer.

The cancer was the imminent life-threatening disaster, and I had zero control over the outcome. The only thing I did have control over was how I showed up for it.

After that moment of realization, I stopped worrying about what was going to happen and started showing up for my mom without the fear. Only love, and the gratitude that we were with each other through the experience. Everything inside me just softened in how I felt towards my mom and the situation.

Then dreams stopped. Message received. And mom’s here to read this story 17 years later.

 

What is My Dad Trying to Tell/Teach Me?

Occasionally, I’ll research the dream and psychology literature about what dreams mean, but mostly I’m in the camp of allowing their meaning to emerge on their own.

In this case, I’m still waiting for that moment of, “oh—that’s what it means,” to emerge with the kind of vivid clarity I had in that last dream story.

My dad died in the ICU around 2 PM on Tuesday, March 15, 2022.

The day before he died, he looked at me and said, “I really hope I’m not dying.”

I responded, “I hope so too, Dad. But I think you might be.”

He said, “I know.”

I asked if there was anything he wanted to talk about. He just said, “No.”

And that was that.

That man did not talk unless it was about cars, guns, or tools, and apparently that’s not what was on his mind the day before he died.

I still carry a small regret that I didn't gently push a little harder. Mostly, though, I suspect I'd have gotten the same answer. He simply didn't do anything until he was good and ready.

When I got to the hospital the morning of the day he died, he was agitated. He was trying to tell me something, but he’d lost his speech. At least, speech that was coherent. He motioned that he wanted to write it down, whatever he needed to tell me.

I grabbed a notebook and a pencil, but he’d lost his fine motor skills and his pencil marks were meaningless scribbles (and now a treasured possession, as the last thing he tried to tell me).

Frustrated, still agitated, he gave up. 

About an hour before he died, I whispered in his ear, “I love you, Dad.”

He responded, “I love you, too.” Those were his last words, and the only cogent words he’d said that day.

Since my dad’s death, I’ve been in a recurring dream cycle where I run into my dad somewhere, and then, after having a happy greeting and reunion, I have a wave of panic and regret when I realize, “Oh no! You’re alive! But I gave away all your stuff!”

In one of the dreams, I was incredibly distraught because I realized I didn’t know my dad’s address. I kept thinking, “How can I not know where my dad lives, and why has it been so long since I’ve gone to visit him?!?”

He’s never upset with me in the dreams. In fact, he’s always calm and exudes a patient, loving energy while I am flipping out. He’s always silent, but fully present. Sometimes I even catch a glimpse of an amused twinkle in his eyes and his signature half-grin.

In waking life, Dad would have been pissed and anything but patient if I gave away all his things—so his calm presence in dreams feels to me like he knows something I don’t know, and he’s just waiting for me to catch up to him.

Maybe I still need to offer myself some forgiveness? Maybe he’s inviting me to find a different way of staying in relationship with him? Maybe he’s still trying to tell me the thing he couldn’t say the day he died? Maybe everything is exactly as it's supposed to be, and I'm simply my own source of suffering?

I don’t know yet.

Hopefully I’ll remember to ask him the next time he visits in my dreams, and hopefully he’ll be able to tell me.

 

Are Drowning Dreams a Clue to a Past Life, and a Source of Healing in This One?

For as long as I could remember, I had drowning dreams. I’d wake up whimpering, thrashing, sweating – pure terror rippling through my body.

I've drowned in every kind of water my sleeping mind could invent: pools, lakes, rivers, oceans, tsunamis, even deep puddles.

Sometime in the last ten years, I mentioned this to my mom. I remember that I was in her living room when I told her this, and she said, “Hold on! Stay right there!”

She disappeared for a while, and eventually returned with a few battered spiral notebooks – her dream journals from the 1980’s.

When I was little, mom would get up early to have some peace and quiet for herself, and write down her dreams. Occasionally, I’d wake up early from a nightmare and seek out her comfort. In those times, she had the wherewithal to write down my nightmare, as dictated by me. She used my exact words, including my little self’s loose grasp on verb tenses. Which, gotta say, is super cute to hear 30-plus years later.

She flipped through her journals until she found all of the times she’d recorded my nightmares. They were always about drowning. I had forgotten that these dreams extended as far back as my very early childhood.

Then she reflected that I was a super happy baby; I was rarely fussy, and usually only cried to express the standard baby needs—I’m hungry, change my diaper, my temperature’s not right, I want to be held—and even then, I was pretty easy to console.

Except bathtime. She said I’d scream and writhe like I was being mortally wounded when they put me in the water, and it took a lot of slow-moving reassurance that I was safe to convince me that it was okay to bathe.

Did I drown in a past life? It certainly makes me wonder.

By the time my mom was recording my drowning dreams in her journals, I was a little fish in the pool—I loved swimming and even swam competitively in high school. Never did care for the lakes and rivers, though. I tried kayaking in college and couldn’t handle the possibility of being trapped underwater in a boat. And low visibility open water was a non-starter.

As part of the dream journal conversation, my mom suggested that the next time I have a drowning dream, that I experiment with allowing myself to drown. Instead of fighting and resisting, go with the inevitable.

So I did.

In the last drowning dream I had, I was on the ground-level of parking garage and I watched a wall of water coming to flood the garage. I was trapped and was surely about to drown. But in a moment of lucid dreaming, which is not a thing I can generally do, I remembered, “let myself drown.”

So, I allowed the water to consume me, and then I was out of body, watching myself floating suspended in the blue water. I watched myself be calm, even reasonably relaxed. I couldn’t breathe, but I found I didn’t need to.

After that, the drowning dreams stopped.

I still dream about being under water, but it’s more like that last one. I’m able to recognize that I don’t need to breathe, or that I am breathing and it’s okay. I’m not especially at ease being underwater, but I do not feel terror anymore.

Since the dreams stopped, I have been able to do my own version of exposure therapy and have taught myself to swim in open water, even murky water, and to snorkel. I don’t love either of these things, but I can do them with a lot of self-coaching and self-soothing.

I still can't watch cave diving videos. Free diving makes me uneasy. I look away during drowning scenes on TV or movies.

I'll never SCUBA dive, and kayaking remains firmly off the list.

 

Final Reflections

When I started writing this piece, I didn’t know what dreams I was going share.

In fact, I wasn’t even going to write about dreams. I was going to write about reverse mortgages as reserve source of cash during a health crisis!

I just started typing, and this is apparently what wanted to come out.

I could have written about my many memorable flying dreams, my house-themed dreams, my animal-themed dreams (wolves find me often), my childhood neighborhood dreams, my showing-up-for-class-on-test-day-having-forgotten-to-go-to-class-all-semester dreams, or my personal favorite: my recurring dream of being a superhero with powers of invisibility and a hovercraft!

Now, as I’m editing and reflecting, I notice that all three dreams I've shared revolve around death in one form or another. More specifically, each one centers on accepting something I couldn't control.

Maybe that's why they've stayed with me.

I've noticed that the most important realizations in my life rarely arrive when I demand them. They emerge slowly, often years after the experience itself. Dreams seem to work that way too. They don't always hand me answers. Sometimes they simply keep asking better questions until I'm finally ready to hear them.

Maybe they've been quietly preparing me for the work I do now.

Or maybe that's simply the meaning I've chosen to make.

 

I'd genuinely love to hear about your dreams.

And the meantime, maybe that essay about reverse mortgages will write itself…

If you are so inclined, email me your dreams at sayhello@deathandmoney.com