- * Note: This is the first in a series of dreams and dream recall and interpretation.
The oldest dream that I recall having was a nightmare. I wouldn’t realize it was in fact a pre-cognitive or prophetic dream until nearly a year later. After 30 plus years this dream is still vivid. In the dream I am supposed to be going to a record store (this was the about 1980 when there were still just records in record stores) with my best friend in high school, Spacey. I get to her house and knock on the door. When no one answers the door, I open it and call out her nickname, Spacey – after Ace Frehley (Space Ace) of KISS- but no one responds. I look in the living room, the kitchen and run down the hall to her bedroom. She isn’t anywhere. Curiously, no one else is home either. In the dream, I begin to feel my heart race. I can’t find her. I call her name again as I run back up the hallway toward the front door and I see her….hanging from a coat hook on the inside of the front door. There is blood everywhere. On her neck and running down her fully clothed body. In my dream I know she was dressed and ready to go out with me to the record store, but she didn’t quite make it out the front door.
Recall of this dream did not come until three months later while I was visiting my grandparents in Florida. It happened while I was sitting in my grandmother’s mustard yellow vinyl recliner reading a collection of rock and roll history from the 1950’s through the late 1970’s. It was relaxing – the first somewhat relaxing day I’d had in a few months. Grief over my friend’s loss had consumed me all day, every day. I replayed memories of us in school, talking on the phone after school and that horrible September day that I learned of her death.
On Thursday that week I wished Spacey a happy birthday. Three days later on a Sunday afternoon I called her house. When I asked to speak with her I heard gasping and crying from the first two family members who answered the phone and then the third person, her uncle, barked through the telephone, “Who is this?” I explained who I was and again asked to speak with her. He told me she had passed away the night before in a vehicle accident.
What’s interesting to me is that this was my first dream recall that I could recall at that time. I did not recall the dream the morning after I had it, nor did I recall it anytime prior to or just after the accident. I wasn’t ready for it, perhaps? Instead, I had a flash of that dream sitting in my grandmother’s recliner. In that flash, I knew I’d dreamt it before and was able to recall the entire dream. Perhaps I was relaxed enough to allow it to come into my consciousness, when I had stopped obsessing over my friend’s death. In other words, the information was already out there in the universe, but I was too busy to receive it.
What I’ve learned is that dreams grab our attention just after we have the dream – even if it wakes us up at 2:00 in the morning – or at a later time. The dream may be recalled upon waking; when a song on the radio triggers the dream recall; or sitting in a chair reading a book.
Leslie Sheridan 