One night I dreamed...
I was moving back to the States (I'm American but I live in Canada) and wanted to say goodbye to Jeff, a man I worked with over ten years ago when I lived in Boston. He was sitting in a parked car, talking to another friend and I didn't want to disturb them, so I walked on. I started crying because I had not had a chance to say goodbye and I would soon be leaving.
Five days after I had this dream, Jeff was killed in the Kenya Air flight that crashed off the coast of Africa, killing all 169 people aboard. Coincidence? It could be, but I don't think so. I had not spoken to or dreamed about Jeff in many years. We had been congenial colleagues when we worked together, but we had not had a close relationship. If the dream was prophetic, why had it come to me?
I may never know the answer to this question, but this dream and other seemingly prophetic dreams suggest that when we sleep, we tap into a mysterious and profound universal wisdom. The dreamscape is a place where everything is possible and where the past, present, and future meet in the Now.
Of course, prophetic dreams do not become prophetic until we look back on them later. I could not have determined that the dream about Jeff was a harbinger of tragedy to come. And for every dream we have that speaks of things to come, we have probably thousands that speak only about our current inner dynamics. If I worried every time I dreamed of my separation from someone I cared about, I would be anxious indeed.
In her book The Hidden Power of Dreams, author Denise Linn says that any dream that allows us to look into the future, view the past, communicate with loved ones who have passed away, gain a vision, or enter into other dimensions is a 'seeing' dream. She says, "These special kinds of dreams expand your horizons into the realms beyond ordinary perception of reality. They allow you to reach below the surface of the human mind, to the place where the world is not made of separate parts but it is seamlessly joined in a rich tapestry of interrelatedness."
Jeff was only 43 years old when he died. He had a wife and two children. And what a kind-hearted man he was. But Linn's description of 'special' dreams encourages me to think that my dream was telling me that Jeff and I were in the process of moving to different dimensions of the Universe, to different 'states.' In the world of the limitless dreamscape, Jeff and I are still part of that rich tapestry of inter-relatedness.
