I Had A Dream

Dreaming is often as real for me as being awake. My dreams are vivid and distinct and the feelings that come afterwards often last hours, sometimes days.

I have always been an active dreamer. Even as a very young child my dreams were very real and sometimes would materialize in 3D, so I joined a Jungian Dream Group as an adult and kept journals for over ten years.

After a nightmare I wake up trembling and soaked in sweat and sometimes so relieved, but sometimes almost traumatized.

Last night I had a terrible dream and finally wrote it down and shared it with a kind friend who allows me to do these things, then I went back to sleep and had another! Imagine having this dream and waking up feeling like that is actually how you spent the night!

My daughter has disappeared and a friend offers to help me find her. She says she thinks she knows where she is. We get in her little blue Renault. It is an old car, but still very shiny bright blue, almost a royal blue and I am afraid we will be too easily seen. We drive along narrow country roads where the shrubbery comes right up to the edges until we see a Thai Temple ahead of us on the right.

She parks the car and we go up the steps. We can hear Catholic priests performing mass inside and know we have to make it through the church in order to get in and find my daughter. I am terrified, but we almost make it completely through before they see us. Now we are running and dodging through corridors made of thick concrete walls with lots of little niches.

Finally I notice that there is a hole in the floor in one of these and we slip down some square columns into the basement. I think my daughter may be down here, but first we have to hide. I don’t think they know where we are yet, so we pick a sort of daybed over in the far corner and throw ourselves under it. Thoughts of spiders and bugs and even snakes that could possibly be here cross my mind, but I force them out because I have no choice. It is hide, or be killed.

My friend now becomes my daughter and she keeps moving around. I whisper roughly to stop moving and I try to keep the blankets pulled down all around us so we won’t be seen, but eventually one of the other young women there notice us. They can’t understand why we are so worried. They tell me the priests are okay as long as you follow their rules, but when I hear them coming, I hide in the back of a huge walk in closet. After the men leave, the girl opens the door and asks if I am in there and what am I doing?

I come out of the closet and discover my daughter and my sons, who are still little boys have gone upstairs. I go up and spend the rest of the dream trying to find my children in the mobs of them climbing the bars and racing around this vast area that is a sort of a dark children’s island. Many of the children carry jagged black scythes and I take these away when I can, only older children are the ones in charge and they don’t understand why I would do that.

Finally I am so tired I lie down by the roadside and fall asleep until a carload of teenagers stop and back up. They seem friendly, but I am afraid and wake up.