I am standing outside. A car comes along the street, a long black car, with an official “limousine” – like appearance.
She steps out of the car. I reach for her hands to help her. She is so cold that I feel frozen too. I look into her slender face, and she looks so old and tired…
“Were you supposed to leave the hospital?” I ask. She does not answer.
She sighs, steps back just a tiny bit as if she expects rejection. “Are you afraid of death?” A question so direct and so profound.. I was shaken to the core…
Should I answer that I am afraid of death? Should I answer that sometimes I just long for things to end? Would that give her the relief she so desperately seeks? I do not know what to do but to give her the warmth I feel inside my living and relatively healthy body. I put my arms around her to give her the warmth of life and I say “Everything must come to an end.”
Everything must come to an end. Life can be as simple as that. This dream about my mother made me think back about the last time I visited my mother in hospital. I knew that she was going to die, but I was afraid to share that information. I am sure I did the right thing by not telling her.
I did some research about dreaming of the lost loved ones and I wrote a book about it: “A dreamers guide into the land of the deceased”. I gathered more than 100 dreams worldwide and took them seriously. I literally read the dreams as tales about life on the other side. A glimpse in the realm of Hades.
Like my own dream about death, many of the dreams I analyzed involved a social gathering. A meeting, a shared meal, a discussion between several people. I found in every dream a clue that enabled people to act in the world. Cause dreams are useless until you act upon them.
So now, you clever reader of Mindfunda are going to ask me: “What did you do with this dream of yours Susanne van Doorn?”. Well, it was more of a spiritual act I engaged upon after dreaming this dream. I acknowledged that my mother and I are so much alike. That might seem a small thing but in waking life I never felt really close to her. I had a feeling that it was mutual. The feeling of the coldness of her hands took me back to the day of her passing. How shocked I was sitting by her bed caressing her cold hands as she passed away. Silently and calm she drifted into another awareness. I needed this dream to give me healing. Everything must come to an end. My memory of the coldness of my mother as well. It is time for me to embrace her memory with all the warmth of my relatively healthy living body. I hope my book can help you interpret dreams about your loved ones more easily.
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Oh I remember the searching dreams after my father died! I searched and searched and cried and cried in my dreams. One night he was standing behind me in a dream, when I looked in the mirror. I knew I had to be quick and I turned around to hug him but just as I embraced him he vanished into air… When I called up my mother, still crying I said to her: “He is dead” and she confirmed: “yes dear, your father is dead”. A few weeks later I experienced a visitation dream. So for me I had to accept his presence in another reality very consciously.
I’m glad to know about your book, Susanne. It makes me sad to think it was the right thing to not discuss death with your mother, but I’m in the same place with my mother-in-law who turned 100 yesterday. She is not interested in discussing death, although she’s already paid for cremation and made sure there will be no heroic intervention. I’ve often written about the guiding dreams I had after my husband’s death. I could not tell if they were entirely within me or were linked to him in his after death state. I felt, in the Tibetan Buddhist way that he favored his last years, that he had moved on quickly and the dreams were my inner images and grappling with grief. They were alive and present, juicy with tears and sexuality, even arguments about whether he was dead or alive, and lots of searching. Where is he? Does he need me? It was a gift to work with a Jungian therapist so I could focus on the illuminating and balancing perspective of the dreams.