Last night I had a dream that my grandfather, Stanley, (we called him Pop-Pop) had somehow come back after being dead for almost twenty years. As he died when I was eleven this would be a very interesting happening. In my mind during the dream I guessed that maybe he hadn’t really died and had only been in a coma, but I also knew this wasn’t possible. I sat next to him on the couch and tried to soak it all in for as long as I could. He looked smaller than I remember, but at eleven I would’ve been a foot shorter at least.
It was nice to see him although I’m sure how I ‘saw’ him was very different even from how he used to look because my memories are very vague. I just knew it was him and it seemed like him. It felt almost like a visitation since he didn’t say much and I think we both knew he was really dead. I don’t remember what we talked about.
Shortly after my grandmother, Elizabeth, his wife, died a little more than a year ago, I had a dream that she was lying in a bed with the covers pulled up and we were talking. I was kneeling on the floor beside the bed. It seemed to me that we both knew she was visiting me after her death and that she was telling me something important. I think it was something about my brother.
Shortly after the funeral at her home, I remember my aunt describing a dream my grandmother had had shortly before her death. It was of an old woman placing a white dove in her hands. To me a dove could symbolize death or the soul. Maybe on some level she knew she was dying even though no one else had any inkling.
I’ve been thinking more about my grandfather lately. He seems to have come up in conversation more than normal regarding things I had not heard before. For instance, my mother told me recently that she was sure about marrying my father when she met my grandfather. She was impressed by the way he was so kind and the way he treated my grandmother. She assumed my father would be the same way.
In my dreams I feel like it is some glimpse of an afterlife, or at least, what it would be like. Everything in dreams is so indeterminate and I always feel so impassive and accepting of whatever happens. This is how I would imagine being a ghost or spirit: remote, impassive.
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Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
–Shakespeare
I had a dream, once, that the limbo between the afterlife and this life was a train station. I had died, and I was waiting at the station for the next train. I somehow got distracted, and I missed it–no worry, there would be another one. In the meantime, I saw someone that I recognized from my life, and I ran up to him to say hello. He didn’t recognize me, and as I tried to describe to him who I was, I found myself unwillingly saying things that weren’t true–as if some other force were controlling me into being unrecognizable, or perhaps my former life was already being wiped away. All I could really do, then, was wait for the next train.
The dream your grandmother had before she passed away reminds me of a story I once read in a book about Jung. I can’t remember if I might have told it to you before, but here goes.
A friend of Jung’s brought him something one day–a book, made by a little girl, showing various dreams she had had. It had been a gift to her father, a friend of Jung’s friend. In the little girl’s dreams she had these amazing, intricate visions of the creation of the world and the end of the world and stuff like that. The illustrations in the book were very detailed and beatiful.
After looking at it, Jung looked worried. He told his friend it was very interesting, but that he had found dreams like those, with that much regularity and detail, in old people near the end of their lives. He had always thought they were a sort of mental preparation for death. He was concerned about what this might mean for a little girl.
Then the friend revealed that the little girl had died soon after the making and giving of the book. She had died of a sudden illness that had not been detected or predicted at the time of the dreams or the making of the book.