Creative Whack # 12: Listen to Your Dreams

I love to dream.  I wish I could remember every detail, but I never can.

Sometimes my dreams reveal things that are interesting, helpful and healing.

One of the best and most vivid of my dreams happened after a dear friend died suddenly.  She was my boss when I worked at American Express.  We had grown very close and I loved her.  I was devastated when she died and had a difficult time overcoming the anger I felt that she was gone.  She had three young children, too.  That was the worst part…..

This is the picture I saw in my dream. This picture of Susan B. Anthony is adapted from the portrait in the History of Woman Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others.

One night, after she’d been gone nearly three months, she came to visit me in a dream.  It was not like my normal dreams, which are usually really colorful and wild.  This dream was focused -very sedated, or maybe soft is a better word to describe how it felt.

The interesting thing about this dream?  There were two me’s.  There was the me sleeping and laying there, doing the  dreaming.  Then, there was the me who talked to Jean while my sleeping self laid there.  I knew I was dreaming that I was looking down at myself dreaming…. but still, it was more real than a dream

It was like a dream within a dream within a dream that was real.  Does that make sense?

Hah!  Probably not!

Well, my dreaming self  (while I knew the me looking down at myself dreaming was also dreaming, it was so real at the time and in retrospect, too.

I remember asking if she visited her kids because they missed her so much.

She told me they were doing fine.  She said she worried about me – needed me to stop crying.  She wanted to tell me she was happy and I needed to stop worrying and start living.  That was the essence of the message.

I can’t sit here and say, with 100 percent certainty that it was an out-of-body experience, or anything like that.  But somehow, I know that is what it was.   I can’t say with certainty, but I feel certain about it.  One thing I am certain about, I felt better from then on….

In another dream, I heard the name Susan B. Anthony and shown a coin of some kind that her profile was on.  I didn’t know what it meant, but it was vivid.

I was in my twenties and had never heard the name Susan B. Anthony.  And I didn’t know that, in about a six months later,  her picture would be on the new one dollar coin.    Then, when it was announced in the news and in the paper, that she would be the first woman to be honored on a coin, and I saw her picture and the picture of the coin, I was shocked.  It was exactly what I’d seen in my dream!

I didn’t tell anyone for years about it because I thought no one would believe me, and why in the world would I be dreaming of a woman from the 1800, and why would I see the coin?

I didn’t second-guess myself about what I saw, I knew what I’d seen.  But I didn’t know WHY I’d seen it!  I still don’t know why.  It seemed very strange to me and I told no one about it until years later.

It was a strange premonition!

Anyway, I’m still listening and dreaming with my eyes wide open – now more than ever.