Many of my stories are peppered with dreams that have proven
to be real in waking life. I have learned to pay attention...
This story marks the beginning of that learning...the breakthrough
to the reality of dreams.
It started with a letter that I received from my mother a week after Christmas.
In the letter, she described a vision she'd had a few days before Christmas...
an experience that mirrored a dream I had on the same night.
So many people that I talk to have difficulty with their dreams.
Admittedly, some dreams are jarring, troubling and puzzling.
Many are foretelling of difficult events.
We want to run from them, put them behind us, keep them at arms length.
But dreams are valuable and if they are coming at you,
you are ready to learn.
An initial period of discomfort is natural-it's ok to feel uneasy.
You were uncomfortable getting behind the wheel of a car in the beginning,
but once you got the hang of it, it was fun, a great skill and now it's simply
a part of you.
In a similar manner, when your inner abilities begin to emerge,
you can welcome them as a part of you.
Never allow fear to hold you back from this valuable resource
that has always been a part of you.
Just learn to decode the experiences and reap the benefits.
This is the dream that opened the door for me and convinced me
that dreams have substance far beyond what we imagine.
A few days before Christmas one year, I had a dream about my mother
that was as strange as it was troubling.
In the dream, I was standing at my mother's bedside in Portland, Oregon.
(I had lived out east for many years and had never visited her in that home)
In the dream, it was the middle of the night and mom was sitting up in bed
in her pajamas. We were in mid-conversation.
I was pouring my heart out to her in the most uncharacteristic way.
Tearfully, I apologized for not coming home for Christmas for all those years.
I told her how sorry I was for hurting her feelings and how much I loved her.
I gushed on and on along those lines for some time...
As I was experiencing the dream, another part of me which I'll call
my 'daytime self' found this whole outpouring very strange.
The whole scene was dreadfully emotional, but I couldn't stop the torrent
of words and emotions.
The funny thing was, we were never like this in real life...
I felt as though I was right there with her, though I'd never seen her home.
A lucid dream...
I finally woke from the dream, emotionally shaken and thoroughly confused.
The dream wouldn't let go of me, though I tried to brush it off and dismiss it.
It took several hours for me to get my day on track, but even with that,
the dream lingered uncomfortably in the back of my mind for days.
A bit of background...
Mom and I had been estranged for 25 years...since I was 17.
Except for obligatory holiday and birthday phone calls and 3 brief,
difficult visits, we lived separate lives on opposite shores.
Every bit of distance helped.
I felt a painful lump in my throat, coupled with a great deal of hurt
and resentment each time she called.
We kept our conversations polite and brief.
Later in life, although she'd given birth to 4 daughters,
she renounced three of us.
When meeting people, she claimed she'd only had one daughter.
So you can imagine...
In the context of our history, this dream was the strangest,
most unimaginable conversation possible!
It left me uncomfortable, unwilling to entertain even the thought
of such a heartfelt exchange.
I had tried and failed too many times with her.
Though we were close in the early years, our relationship was
irretrievably broken now.
We had never been sentimental in the best of times.
As far as I knew, coming home for Christmas was never even an issue
between us.
I wrote the dream off.
It was too absurd for anything other than that.
So Christmas came and went in the usual manner.
I was relieved to have it behind me.
A week later, a letter arrived in the mail from my mother.
It was the first and only time that my mother had ever put pen to paper...
I opened it with some trepidation...
My mother wanted to relay an experience that she'd had a few days
before Christmas...
"I was in a deep sleep when suddenly something woke me up!
I sat straight up in bed...wide awake...and then I saw YOU standing
at the foot of my bed. You were crying and saying...."
ALL of the things I had said in that strange dream...word for word.
Every word...every nuance.
What a jolt!!!
How could that be?!
Yet, it was...
She ended it with a simple "I just wanted to let you know."
We never spoke of it... I was too dumbfounded to reply.
Easier to keep silent and wonder...
That experience opened the door to the reality of dreams for me...
Here was the confusing thing...
I was dreaming, but Mom was wide awake. Startled awake and fully alert.
The experience had enough impact on her that she wrote it down
and shared it with me.
Strange that she hadn't told me over the phone...too hot to handle?
It no doubt startled her, too!
It would be years before I became familiar with the word bi-location...
the ability to appear in 2 places at once.
Since that time, I have had several experiences of bi-location.
What I managed to come away with was that, on some very deep level,
my mother and I still retained a heart connection...we loved each other.
We were not broken on a soul level.
However on this level, we were never able to work things out.
I remembered the dream and I hoped that she had, as well.
As time went on, my mother became more distant and cold.
She moved out of state without telling 3 of us, breaking all contact. Communication ended.
There was some evil that could not be removed.
Though we were mother and daughter, at some deep, unseen level
we seemed to be enemies.
It confused me...
She died some years later...on Christmas Day.
I was not notified.
However, a dream intervened once more...
On that particular Christmas eve, I had gone to a favorite restaurant
with my friend Bob (of "The First Church of Bob" story).
Curiously, in retrospect, the friendship with Bob turned out to be
the closest thing to a substitute for what was lost with my mother.
There was a similar vibe...
They were both spiritualists in their outlook on life...seekers of truth
in unconventional places.
It was a problematic friendship at times...again, a bit of a mirror.
We stayed late and ended the evening with a round of drinks with the staff.
Once home, I fell into a deep and tipsy sleep.
That night, I had another very curious dream...disturbing and powerful.
In this dream, I found myself in a dingy city...a place of oppressive darkness.
It felt like all I had ever known...only darkness and depravity, blocking any awareness of goodness or beauty. I had grown up in that awful place.
I was trapped and suffering...weak and dejected.
I suddenly became aware of 3 large winged beings flying down toward me.
I felt these powerful (angelic?) beings prying me loose and lifting me bodily
into the air...up and out of that terrible place.
I was being rescued from its dark grip.
They took me high into the air. I was carried over a great body of water
where I was placed with great and tender care on a small, pristine island.
Everything was clean, unspoiled and incredibly beautiful.
I felt a clear sense of deliverance from my former oppressive circumstances.
The contrast between the two worlds was tremendous.
With this deliverance came a strong caution to remain on this unspoiled island
and not to go back to that place.
Once set free, it was my responsibility to stay there and not get entangled again.
It was a very powerful experience. It shook me... It liberated me.
It was as if I had not been able to see what oppression held me except in light
of the experience of being rescued and being laid on the white sands
of the beach in this beautiful place.
I journalled the dream... I tried to understand it's import.
At first I attributed the meaning to the obvious...to Bob.
While there was some good potential in our conversations,
there was a kind of energetic undertow.
So often our conversation was good on the surface, but I found
myself drained for a couple of days afterward.
It was time to put some distance between us once again.
It would take some time and distance to understand.
In the months that followed, I began to wonder if my mother had passed.
I thought I felt her presence...but not in a good way.
She had a way of pulling on me that left me similarly drained.
I searched several times to confirm her passing, but nothing ever came to light.
Then, 6 years later, I received a call from my sister.
She had also been kept in the dark, but she was able to ferret out
the details of mom's passing...early on Christmas morning.
I recalled the strange dream of some years before.
I now saw the dream in a fresh light...
I checked my journal...she had passed that very same night...
close to the time of the dream.
I was released from my mother's oppressive energy at her passing.
More could be said, but I knew this was a better fit.
It was a very sobering and sane-making dream...
My mother had always overstepped her boundaries with me...
keeping me as a personal servant, extension of her, surrogate mother
to my sisters, surrogate wife to my dad.
She felt that I owed her my life...for life.
For my sanity's sake, I had to escape her snares, but extrication came
with a terrible price...her rejection and hatred.
She then latched on to a younger sister.
She was similarly manipulated...the life sucked from her, as well.
These are difficult and terrible dynamics to encounter and describe,
but the painful truth is that this is something that happens to all too
many people...
Overbearing parents bent on misappropriating the lives of their children.
It was in death that her power was substantially broken on an energetic level.
The dream signified so much...
It was worse than I had been able to see clearly unaided.
With the help of the dream, I could see from a greater vantage point.
Prior to hearing from my sister, I had been working things out intuitively.
For 3 1/2 years, I felt her pulling at me, pulling at my lifeforce...
much as she had in life, but in a clearer way.
Along the way, I learned about hungry ghosts in the Oriental traditions.
The disembodied souls that try to take life energy...and sometimes life...
from the living, of whom they are envious and angry.
For 3 1/2 years I resisted...not knowing for sure if that was right or wrong.
It didn't feel healthy to me... It felt safer to resist her pulling.
After that, there was a period of peace and calm. No more pulling.
Not much awareness or thought of her for a couple of years.
But then I began to perceive her faintly again.
I had a growing awareness...but it felt different this time.
There was none of the familiar pulling that I dreaded.
Instead, I felt her watching me from a high corner of the vaulted ceiling
of my Thai massage room.
Silent, unobtrusive observing...
Slowly I began to understand what was happening.
It was if she was 'sentenced' to watch me throughout my day.
Thai massage is very spiritual, nurturing work.
It is a spiritual practice as well as a physical one, calling for awareness,
gentleness and non-judgmental compassionate lovingkindness.
It has brought out the best in me over time.
My mother who was so judgmental and who instilled as much in me,
was seeing a different version of me than the one she'd cultivated.
She had delighted in negativity, and had always concocted terrible stories
about her girls. Typical of her was labeling me a drug user during the years
I was getting people off of drugs, or taking credit for any success I achieved
when she'd had nothing to do with it.
She'd kept us all upset and separated with these fabrications.
Now, it felt as if she was being forced to see how wrong and spiteful she had been. What she witnessed on a daily basis was the truth of my life.
The witnessing lasted for a couple of years.
She could not speak to me or interfere...only observe.
Her soul was in rehabilitation...a long and patient process.
Then things went quiet again for some time.
About 2 years later, I was struggling with a personal situation.
At the root of the struggle were the poisonous attitudes and fear she had instilled in early childhood to keep me at her side,
Decades later, I was still wrestling with the last harmful vestiges at a critical time in life. Her hypocrisy and manipulations had caused a lot of harm.
I voiced my frustration to her.
"You did this to me! It was all a lie...for your benefit!"
The final clarity...
Unexpectedly, I began to feel her remorse and pain over the damage she'd caused.
It was as if she was also seeing clearly now.
She began to reach out from beyond the grave to help with the issue.
It was a group effort from the other side, actually.
A person recently passed into spirit who had experienced my struggle,
brought images of my early childhood that helped me understand
my difficulties.
A psychic brought information from my mother...unbidden...and then another.
The last communication was but a single word which was indecipherable
to the medium who gave it, but it was the one word that encapsulated the issue
and brought about the final healing and restoration.
In conclusion, I think that for all the seemingly tragic circumstances and pain
we encounter in life, there is, albeit slowly, a good resolution.
Soul growth is painstaking and thorough...and ongoing.
'The Death of my Father' is another outstanding story of soul growth from
beyond the grave.
all rights reserved
Debra Robinson / skydancer@ij.net