more on the supernatural
i have another story to tell. this one also deals with things outside of my common frame of reference (sorry, physics kicks in, and it's all relative), but is not creepy.
anyone familiar with carl jung and his ideas on dreams? jung says that we have two kinds of dreams, "little" dreams, which are as we know, a dump for the subconcious. "big" dreams, though, are an expression of the collective subconcious, and can have great meaning. jung also says that this is another form of communication, that, well..i'll let the story speak for itself.
when i was a sophomore, my mother's sister was in the hospital with leukemia. apparently, there are four kinds of leukemia, and she had the worst. it was a long, horrible summer, and the end was, in the end, inevitable. she did eventually succumb to the illness, and it was .. there are not words to say how bad this was for me. Susan did not have any children of her own, and as such, she treated my brother and i as her children.
she helped me buy my first car.
when i was in trouble with my parents, she was the one i would call.
she helped me to cope with the onset of womanhood, from being a girl.
she was one of my best friends.
in august of that year, she died. i flunked physics II that year, because i was unable to function at a high enough level to deal with all of this. i lost a close family member, too young. i lost my first great love. i flunked a class for the very first time. too much loss. too much pain. i was a little lost, and a lot scared. my roommate was living with her boyfriend at the time, so i had a lot of free time to sit and be with myself in my mind. i drank a lot, to cope, to sleep. to get over the guilt at having not been there all the times i wasn't. and one night, i had a dream.
i was living in a college apartment complex. not very spacious, not very chic. my bedroom had a window that faced west, and from the beginning of the night to the middle would let the moon in. one night i awoke, from someone rubbing my shin and urging me to wake up, very gently. i did, and when i could focus, i saw that it was Susan sitting at the foot of my bed. i recall being almost driven to tears at the idea that i had one more chance to talk with her. and we did talk, altough i don't recall about what.
and i was warm and comfortable in her company, like i had been so many times before. i insisted that she was dead, was gone, and she retaliated with a smile that said it didn't really matter. that just this once, it wouldn't make any difference where we were or what we were, and it made me simply happy. so i stayed curled up under the comforters, and talked with my aunt at the foot of my bed, who would laugh and occasionally slap me on the leg for something, some itinerant joke.
and then, somehow i knew, she had to go. the only part of our conversation i recall is the end, where she looked at me most sincerely and told me, it's okay. you need to go on with your life. and reluctantly, i agreed, i can do this, if you want me to. and she assured me, it's okay. and then she was gone.
when i woke, i didn't know what had happened. that is, i didn't know if it had been real, or one of my incredibly real dreams. i only knew that somewhere inside me, i had a feeling of peace where only a hole had been before, and i felt certain that it was okay for me to get back to me. that i could stop punishing myself. that there had been nothing to punish for.
is this one of jung's "big" dreams? did someone come back from wherever to tell me that they were okay? was it only a product of my subconcious to assume that i had been visited one last time by someone i loved? will i stop asking rhetorical questions?
i don't know. i only know, as with the last story, what i felt. i felt it was real. i could see her, see the moonlight reflect off of her round cheeks that so resemble mine. and more than that, i had comfort and i had closure, and that i couldn't deny.
so i leave it to you, humble reader, to decide what you think of this story. i will attest to my dying day that it happened, and that i felt it, and i know what it was. i needed something, and for the only time i can recall, the universe answered me. so if it was a dream, then please let me keep dreaming, and if it was a fantasy, then let me have more. and if it was supernatural, then please please, let the supernatural be real for everyone.
for susan, whom i loved very much.
anyone familiar with carl jung and his ideas on dreams? jung says that we have two kinds of dreams, "little" dreams, which are as we know, a dump for the subconcious. "big" dreams, though, are an expression of the collective subconcious, and can have great meaning. jung also says that this is another form of communication, that, well..i'll let the story speak for itself.
when i was a sophomore, my mother's sister was in the hospital with leukemia. apparently, there are four kinds of leukemia, and she had the worst. it was a long, horrible summer, and the end was, in the end, inevitable. she did eventually succumb to the illness, and it was .. there are not words to say how bad this was for me. Susan did not have any children of her own, and as such, she treated my brother and i as her children.
she helped me buy my first car.
when i was in trouble with my parents, she was the one i would call.
she helped me to cope with the onset of womanhood, from being a girl.
she was one of my best friends.
in august of that year, she died. i flunked physics II that year, because i was unable to function at a high enough level to deal with all of this. i lost a close family member, too young. i lost my first great love. i flunked a class for the very first time. too much loss. too much pain. i was a little lost, and a lot scared. my roommate was living with her boyfriend at the time, so i had a lot of free time to sit and be with myself in my mind. i drank a lot, to cope, to sleep. to get over the guilt at having not been there all the times i wasn't. and one night, i had a dream.
i was living in a college apartment complex. not very spacious, not very chic. my bedroom had a window that faced west, and from the beginning of the night to the middle would let the moon in. one night i awoke, from someone rubbing my shin and urging me to wake up, very gently. i did, and when i could focus, i saw that it was Susan sitting at the foot of my bed. i recall being almost driven to tears at the idea that i had one more chance to talk with her. and we did talk, altough i don't recall about what.
and i was warm and comfortable in her company, like i had been so many times before. i insisted that she was dead, was gone, and she retaliated with a smile that said it didn't really matter. that just this once, it wouldn't make any difference where we were or what we were, and it made me simply happy. so i stayed curled up under the comforters, and talked with my aunt at the foot of my bed, who would laugh and occasionally slap me on the leg for something, some itinerant joke.
and then, somehow i knew, she had to go. the only part of our conversation i recall is the end, where she looked at me most sincerely and told me, it's okay. you need to go on with your life. and reluctantly, i agreed, i can do this, if you want me to. and she assured me, it's okay. and then she was gone.
when i woke, i didn't know what had happened. that is, i didn't know if it had been real, or one of my incredibly real dreams. i only knew that somewhere inside me, i had a feeling of peace where only a hole had been before, and i felt certain that it was okay for me to get back to me. that i could stop punishing myself. that there had been nothing to punish for.
is this one of jung's "big" dreams? did someone come back from wherever to tell me that they were okay? was it only a product of my subconcious to assume that i had been visited one last time by someone i loved? will i stop asking rhetorical questions?
i don't know. i only know, as with the last story, what i felt. i felt it was real. i could see her, see the moonlight reflect off of her round cheeks that so resemble mine. and more than that, i had comfort and i had closure, and that i couldn't deny.
so i leave it to you, humble reader, to decide what you think of this story. i will attest to my dying day that it happened, and that i felt it, and i know what it was. i needed something, and for the only time i can recall, the universe answered me. so if it was a dream, then please let me keep dreaming, and if it was a fantasy, then let me have more. and if it was supernatural, then please please, let the supernatural be real for everyone.
for susan, whom i loved very much.
posted by ginonymous at
9:50 PM
5 Comments:
I'm with Jung on this one. Seems like maybe the internal subconscious struggle finally worked itself out and was letting you know.
I think she came back, and I think this because I had similar experiences, and only one could be attributed to Jung's theory.
The Jung-able one: my great-aunt (unmarried, childless, but with more than a million bucks -- unbeknownst to any of us) died. There was a squabble because of the money, including one extremely ugly incident where the second wife of a distant uncle (laying claim to the money, of course) screamed "She hated all of you!"
The night after that, I had a dream about my great aunt's old apartment in Chicago. She took me to the pantry, where all of the sights and smells of my visits to her came back as clear as a bell, and she pointed to the glass jar of Charms suckers she always had there for us kids.
Then she took me to the old refrigerator, and showed me the cans of root beer and bottles of Yoo-Hoo she always had in there. She said, "I never hated you." And then she was gone and the dream ended. That could be a Jung thing.
But, I had another unexplainable one. My friend's twin brother died of a heart attack at the unexpected age of 35. Months later, I had a dream where he visited me in my dreams, and said, "Yeah, I'll be heading up (to heaven I suppose) soon. But once you go, you can't come back, and there's a party this weekend. I'll go after that."
And the good news is, if that guy got in, all of those fundamentalists are wrong about who's going to hell.
Ultimately does it really matter whether it was a dream (according to Jung or not) or a visit by a missed
loved one (though I'm pretty strongly disinclined to believe in such things). Whatever it was, it filled a void that clearly needed filling, and that seems a pretty good thing.
But ...... you should've asked her to pinch you!
Tradition taught me that all things are focused on the four directions. North,South,East and West. East is where the sun rises, it represents the beginning of the day, life, and journey. West represents the end of a day, life, and journey. When you talk about the window facing west and you sleeping that way it just reminded me of what my uncles used to say. "If you ever need to send a message to our ancestors, face the west as the sun is going down and they will get it." I've never had a dream where a person that was in my life but is no longer physically there show up. I always dream about people that I havent seen in a long time and we carry on long conversations. I wonder if they dream the same that night sometimes.
Reading this rocked me somewhere pretty deep in my soul. There are some very uncomfortable resonances for me.
I had a "visit" that happened almost exactly as you describe from a relative who'd just died but I didn't know she'd died, and I can feel her presence when I think about her. But I absolutely can not entertain those thoughts. I have to turn away from them, because if I follow them, I go mad.
Jung was a maniac, a complete career head and a fruitcake, but he did and said some arguably spectacular things. I'll leave it at that.
If your thoughts and experiences on this bring you comfort, I am glad. If your thoughts and experiences on this make you excited, I am glad. For me, it is a road to hell that I don't even look down any more.
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