By Paul Sohar
Beware of dreams! They may come true. Many of mine do; that’s why I take them seriously, especially the unhappy ones. Psychologists consider them manifestations of anxiety, but in my experience, they have proven to be only too-clear portents of the future. Perhaps everything that has ever happened or will happen is already recorded in some universal network, which we access by accident in dreams and premonitions, still the only means of time travel available to us in this technologically advanced age of ours. I realize that the numerous such incidents I could cite would constitute only anecdotal evidence for my amateur speculation here; however, the dream I propose to relate here was unique in the way it not only gave me a painfully accurate picture of the future but became an integral part of reality for me, as much a part of my life as filling out tax returns. But enough of speculation; let’s get down to facts.
It happened more decades ago than I’d care to count, and it concerned my teenage daughter who was at that time still living with me. Her mother was by then living in an institution due to serious psychiatric problems. Her troubles surfaced shortly after giving birth to our daughter and prevented her from fully discharging her duties as a mother; I more or less had to take care of both of them until our daughter started high school and my wife was installed in a psychiatric facility that she has never left.
Thus, by the calendar of this mortal world, I was middle-aged when the dream came to me, and my daughter was in her late teens, a beautiful girl with a radiant personality and a hopeful future. No wonder I was shocked to my core by the scene where the dream escorted me like Virgil guided Dante into inferno, except I didn’t have a guide to explain the situation that appeared painfully real to me.
In the dream I found myself in a large, shabby room, some kind of a public space or waiting room with tired-looking people in the background, and I was talking to a middle-aged woman in a tent dress that covered her somewhat bloated body; she had a lit cigarette in one hand and with the other she waved my words of reproach away from the air between us.
“I know, Dad, you don’t have to tell me…But believe me, I’m trying to do my best,” she argued as usual, and by the tone of her voice I immediately recognized my daughter in this stranger. No doubt about it, she spoke and gestured as I knew her.
But her appearance!
Where is the slender beauty with the angel face? In the pudgy cheeks of this apparition only her hazel eyes looked familiar. Her appearance reminded me of her mother’s fellow residents in that faraway, sad institution we visited now and then.
“Believe me, Dad, I’m doing the best I can…It’s just the meds, you know…And everyone smokes here.”
Where? Surely not up there? Or in some other institution? Not you, too? I could not hide my horror from her. Maybe I didn’t want to. It was a horror show, this picture of the future. Her future. Where did I go wrong?
“But why do you have to do this to yourself?” I groaned in misery, feeling the weight of years to come. Hope, struggle, failure. And starting all over again. The roller-coaster ride of living with mental illness.
“But Dad, we did have some good times, didn’t we?” Strangely, her voice unexpectedly turned brighter, it was gleaming with fulfillment and hope.
Suddenly, the whole scene changed from the shabby lobby to summertime in our back yard with a bunch of kids gamboling on the lawn, but the focus was on my little six-year-old wearing a red dress and her mother directing the game by clapping her hands; and yes, happiness was radiating from every face, mine too, I felt it flood all over it as I was standing at the grill. The two persons most important to me were both happy and healthy. Incredible! It was a birthday picnic for my little girl, an occasion she cherished so much, and obviously so did I, because its replay in this scene made me so deliriously happy that I forgot all about the projected future, her bleak grown-up years to come as foretold only seconds earlier, so completely was I transported into that party, so real it felt in that dream. Its bittersweet aspect caught up with me as soon as I woke up, drained of all strength and with my eyes drenched with tears. That dream had taken me into a sad future and then, gliding over my consciousness of the present of that time, it landed me in the past, touching three points widely apart in time. I felt torn apart by the tug and pull of the dream; if the past event the dream had reproduced was real, then how about the future it had predicted for my vivacious teenage daughter? Was that to become reality?
Back then I didn’t tell anyone—least of all the protagonist—about my time travel in this dream; the past where the dream landed me was just a sweet memory, and the future it showed was impossibly scary. But excruciatingly accurate; a year or two later the portentous dream started to come true; a dramatic hospitalization was followed by attempts at recovery and falling back again and again, while she took up the insidious habit of smoking and slowly became the chubby and impish woman of the dream in spite of my efforts to turn back the clock to the fork in the road where maybe there was a chance to change her life for the better.
And then, just a short time ago, fate turned the clock off in the form of a medical accident. She’s no more. How come no dream warned me of that tragic outcome? Dreams, our only means of time travel, are unreliable, but the picture of a timeless universe they paint is undeniable. Maybe that’s the Other World, where all of our earthly moments are stored and where departed and living souls can mingle with our selves at various ages. Where even unfulfilled hopes are as precious as are moments of happiness.
At this point, I may be accused of wrapping myself in the fog of speculation instead of admitting to my feeling of guilt. Accidents of this sort are usually a combination of events and involve the negligence on the part of a number of people. Yes, I was one of them. There were signs of trouble ahead that everyone, including me, ignored. True, dreams of the impending doom did not appear to me, but they did to her. She said nothing about them; she woke up though in the middle of the night with a choking sensation. She was even taken to a hospital from her residential house where she lived, but they only saw a minor case of COPD and sent her back after a day or two. She had an episode like that on a home visit. She got up from her sleep saying she could not breathe; I led her back to bed, turned her to one side, and she slept through the night. She must have had a nightmare. A portent. I should have recognized it and acted on it. Should have kept an eye on her meds and treatments. And, instead of listening to her doctors, I should have listened to her dreams. They were saying a lot more. Why didn’t I listen? They obviously spoke of the Reaper stalking her. But maybe I was too busy waiting for him to come for me, having just recovered from a recent heart attack. Or, am I mystifying this tragedy again? No, I’m only trying to atone for my part in it without self-flagellation. I asked her for her forgiveness when I got to the hospital, but in spite of all the support machinery around her I was talking to a corpse already, as the hospital staff admitted it later. In that case, though, I’d like to believe I was speaking to her spirit and she heard me.
There’s one more thing I’d like to tell her; she was not any more dependent on me than I was on her. I often took her out of that communal house for nice vacations and trips to the city for shows and dinners, things she would have to do without once I was gone. On the other hand, she was my lifeline to reality, to the world out there. And now our real-life contact has come to an end, but her words from that dream will ring forever in my ears: “But Dad, we did have some good times, didn’t we?” And I’ll keep answering her as long as I live: “Yes, Cammie, we did have some good times together!”
At this point, I don’t know what bothers us more about dreams: The fact that we don’t believe them when they so precisely predict the future or the way they bring us back to past events in heart-wrenching details that we didn’t fully appreciate as they were happening. Life passes us by without us being fully aware of it because we worry too much about the future instead of accepting it as it comes.
One more thought: I wonder if my random but accurate glimpses of the future as they come to me in my dreams may be somehow enhanced by the neurological condition (epilepsy) that perhaps makes me more sensitive to the waves of that (hypothetical) universal network of consciousness. But now this is a question for philosophers and dreamers rather than for medical science.
Perhaps I should not be so apologetic about my indulgence in mystical notions here; if my daughter was an integral part of my life while still alive, it must have been some invisible force that kept us together, a conduit of spiritual energy as it used to be called when believing in such things was still socially acceptable. Yet gravity, too, is an invisible force, and when Isaac Newton first proposed it on a mathematical basis, his enlightenment-inspired materialist contemporaries berated him for resorting to such a mystical idea. Since then, theoretical physicists have discovered several other forces of nature. Who knows, someday even spiritual forces may be validated.