The Howl

Psychically we heal by fits and starts. Here I slide back from the equanimity toward death that I was beginning to achieve in my last dream.

The Dream: I get a phone call from my older brother. He is crying and inarticulate, howling. I understand with a sinking feeling that Mother is dead.

Interpretation: My mother had been dead for more than seven years when I had this dream, but my younger brother had died a few months before. In the dream I feel terror at facing the mortality of those I love and, ultimately, of myself. I've lost all sense of the hope Stephen had offered in the previous night's dream.

Boxed In

This dream begins a series dealing with the deaths of loved ones over the years.

The Dream: I am trying to move, packing my things into a car. Stephen (a friend from long ago, now dead) is helping. There are things I can't solve that he easily overcomes. For example, to load the backseat he removes a sliding door, effortlessly. I hadn't realized that was possible. I'm in the backseat as he does this and get “boxed” in. I wonder how I'll get out so that I can join him in the front seat, but then it occurs to me that I can climb over the seat back. This realization gives me a free and happy feeling.

Interpretation: Stephen, my first close friend to die, has come to help me move (move on). In other words, he helps me begin to accept our limited time on earth and gives me a sense of the possibility of an afterlife. Because he has passed through death he understands things that I don't. He knows how to work the sliding door, the moveable separation between this life and the next. I am almost boxed in by my limited view, but just in time get enough insight to climb out of my difficulty.

Stephen

The Dream: I’m in a school-like setting. I enter a classroom and see Stephen at the front of the room, conferring with 3 or 4 other people. I only glimpse him behind the others. I am dressed fashionably, in a mauve hooded cape over a slim skirt. I am aware of being glamorous. I walk through the room toward a back exit, hoping Stephen will notice me. I’m not sure whether or not he does.

I leave the room, wandering the hallway. Will Stephen follow me? Seek me out? “He was the love of my life,” I think. Then I realize that can’t be right. What about my husband? I think about my attachment to Stephen, feeling it’s ridiculous. In love with a gay man? How utterly futile. What is the attraction? I ask myself. We connected, I decide, on an artistic level.

Interpretation: The outfit I’m wearing in this dream was triggered by my watching children draw Little Red Riding Hood on a TV show. I had been reading about visitation dreams on-line, which no doubt inspired the visit from Stephen, a dear friend who died in 1991. As the dream puts these images together, the cape becomes mauve, the color of mourning, and I learn (I’m in a school setting) how to deal with loss by becoming very practical (the relationship was futile; I have another love) and by connecting the lost person to something that I still have, my interest in art.

Union of Spirit

I awakened remembering a dream from twenty years ago with new insight into its meaning.

The Dream: Stephen, a very close friend, is in hospital, dying of Aids. He looks ghastly, covered with sores. “Let’s make love,” he says. I am appalled and horrified. “Now?! I say, “Now you want to make love?” As much as we loved each other, because he was gay we had never been lovers.

I found out shortly after having this dream that Stephen had, in fact, died.

Interpretation: Stephen once criticized me for having a “literal” mind. If I could have seen beyond the literal meaning of what he was saying to me in the dream, perhaps I could have been a better friend. Had I been able to spiritually embrace him instead of shrinking from him, perhaps I could have eased both his passing and my grief. Why did I remember this dream now? Aunt Peggy’s declining state has brought to the fore the difficult issue of mortality.