Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Ebb and Flow.
Since I was 14, I’ve had different types of dreams. Some are a hodge-podge of daily life…just mundane things or fear dreams or simply recounting the day.
Some are prophetic—that first happened with my cousin Terri’s unexpected death when I was 14, followed by the death of her child, in which I was at her funeral and later at her baby’s funeral. The dreams used to scare me because they usually foretold a death the next day (worst case, 3 days)that I could do nothing about because I was a kid.
And then later, well into my 30’s, I started having dreams that were informative, metaphorical dreams, such as a dream that shows me that someone is keeping something from me for a particular reason and my subconscious shows it to me and helps me to realize what I otherwise would deny.
All three types of dreams are very, very specific in their “feel.” I can’t describe what I mean by “feel,” just that I know what it is and how it is. The meditation in my previous entry and the dreams I’ve described in my private friends-only post are different. These are absolutely as if I’ve been dropped into someone else’s dreams—and not in a pleasing way. I have enough awareness of my dream life and subconscious to know what’s different.
These are structured in a different way that don’t feel like my normal dreams or meditations at all. The information in them is wrong, often. Out of date more so than just wrong. There’s enough factually bad information to be aware in the dreams that they’re wrong. It’s not a matter of just accepting the reality that’s presented in the dream and moving right along with it. I know it’s wrong when the dreams comes. The annoying thing is that I have to wake myself up, but I have a plan for that. Yet at the same time, it’s rather amusing how bad the info is. People who have broken up are together. People who’ve weren’t together but are now are still trying to get together. They’re populated with people I don’t know but would if I met them in a dream, like someone who claims to be a nameless classmate from school or a colleague I haven’t seen in years but often talk about. If either of those two showed up in a dream, I’d recognize them, most likely by them looking as they did when I last saw them. That’s the norm for my dreams.
I am in locations I’ve never been in. They’re generic to an extent and then there’ll be a school building that’s utterly unfamiliar, followed by a garden that’s unfamiliar, followed by a living room that’s unfamiliar, followed by a rural churchyard that’s unfamiliar. This is all unusual for my dreams.
The people in the dreams don’t feel right either. They have to tell me who they are because I don’t recognize them. They, in fact, go to great lengths to tell me who they are. But really, would my college roommate ever show up in a dream not looking anything like herself and say, “Hi, I’m your old college roommate—honest”? Rather than saying her name, which no one who’s known me in the past year knows or has heard me say? That’s never happened in my dreams before. And the thing is, when they tell me who they’re supposed to be, I don’t believe them. Because they generally don’t look anything like the person they’re claiming to be. And even if they do look physically the same, the energy isn’t theirs. They look the same but the eyes betray them. Their words betray them as well. People who are loving and supportive in my life (or were many months ago when the dreams were still “in-date”) are giving me horrible advice that they would never give in real life. Their actions, movements, gestures are not consistent with the real people either. I know on so many levels that they’re not whom they would have me believe they are.
These dreams are overwhelmingly negative and seem to be for the purpose of filling me with sudden doubt, fear, anxiety, almost as if the hope is for me to see how everything I hope for and wish for is utterly bound for failure with no hope of salvage. These are the most discouraging dreams I’ve ever had in my life. Funny that they’d appear all in the same couple of nights and when I’m feeling more positive about the future than I’ve felt in years.
These dreams are uncharacteristically bloody and gory. I’m not a fan of horror movies for good reason. Things the actors…hmmm, yes, actors…in these dreams show me are related to specific information that I’ve never been privy to, except for know who has and the surface of the experience.
But something interesting is occurring in each of these dreams. It’s as if they’ve been structured to tell me a certain scenario of failure. The infrastructure is set…someone claiming to be someone I care about shows up, identifies himself or herself, “proves” who they are by giving me out-of-date info, doesn’t not carry the energy of the person they claim to be, and then begin to tell me who bad everything is, how I will fail, how I have lost the things I want most, how the people I love hate me or how I’ve hurt them—often in ways that would never happen and in scenarios that are not true, such as Shannon’s grades.
Initially, I honor the dream-form they claim to be and start to hear them out, even when I’m already thinking, something’s wrong here or this isn’t right. But they always push to a point where I question and realize what’s going on. They try to convince me to do things that people who love me would never do, such as giving up dreams and going back to things that held me back before. I rebel. They turn mean then. Turn on me.
That’s the point where I usually wake up or walk away.
Maybe it’s time for me to turn and fight in my dreams. I am, after all, not helpless. I’ve just chosen not to fight on that turf. Not yet.
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