(Female, 50’s) I had a dream so awful last night that I haven’t been able to think or talk about it without crying, but you asked me to write it down so here goes. The dream was about carrying around some awful knowledge.
I dreamed that my daughter died. She’s grown now and living quite far away. She had some health issues as a child, and in my dream she was very sick again, but none of us knew it. I don’t think she knew it either. And she died. I got a phone call that she was dead.
But we were in the middle of some big, stressful event. I don’t know what exactly, but it was some happening, some convention or presentation that we were preparing for and needed to accomplish.
So I didn’t tell anyone that she had died yet– because knowing didn’t matter. There was nothing that could be done, so I had to wait with my knowledge. I felt very sad and very lonely.
And I knew that I had a lot to do too, but I wasn’t ready to deal with that. I had to make arrangements to get her body home and make plans for what– a memorial? a funeral? I didn’t know. We’d never talked or made plans with her because it hadn’t occurred to me that she could die.
So I was leaving the house and I ran into a neighbor. The dream neighbor was not a real person, sort of a conglomeration of people I know. She was a stocky woman with two little girls running around while we were talking in the front yards. She asked me how I was doing and I had to lie and say fine. Then she asked about my daughter and how she was. Her girls were always talking about my daughter, they enjoyed her company so much and they missed her. Again, I had to lie and say she was fine. I had no idea how to keep going.