I Dream of Tommy

I had a dream last night. Of course I did. We dream every night. But I have not remembered a dream since October 15, the day Tom died. This morning I awoke with this dream image: My friend Jón Ágúst Guðjónsson, an Icelandic shaman, was operating a huge piece of earth-moving machinery, piling a mound of rich earth in the meadow in front of my house. Tom was perpetually amused at how literal and transparent my dreams were. Uh, yeah. So, Tom, out there, ANALYZE THIS! 

I wrote that (and posted it on Facebook) last week. I tagged Jón Ágúst, who immediately responded “I look forward to see if Tom sends clues about the meaning in the next few days.” That’s like, shaman talk, way above my pay grade. My view of dreams, which was nourished and enriched by many talks with Tom over the years—his being nourished and enriched by a Jungian dream group he was a part of for close to a decade—is that dreams are a way for one part of you to communicate to another part of you. To send messages, alerts, prompts, pings. Subconscious to conscious. The stuff buried, ignored, unexplored. Free from the external stimuli (not to mention ego) of daily waking life, the subconscious takes over when we sleep. Dreams are often an intriguing mixture of “real” images—people and places you know, snippets of movies, memories—and images or story lines that seem random (hardly ever!) or difficult to interpret (not for me).

So I spent time with that dream, which to me was about (literally) unearthing what needed to be unearthed, about Pachamama sending me a clear signal: Take this dirt, this earth and make something new. Grow something. Make a new landscape with it. Okay: Got it.

But what Jon Agust was talking about was the dream world as a conduit between the living-on-earth (me) and the no-longer-living-on-earth (Tom). That was a little too séance-y for me, thank you very much.

And then, boom. The very next night, I had this dream: I was dancing ecstatically in the meadow (yes, same meadow) with Henry, the one-and-a-half-year-old newest member of our family. As I flung my arms around, I felt that my wedding ring flew off my finger. I panicked. But when I looked down at my hands, I saw that my wedding ring was still there. It was Tom’s wedding band, which I have been wearing on the middle finger of my right hand, was gone. I scoured the meadow. Saw nothing. Hunted desperately. Then, giving up, I walked back to where Henry and I had been dancing. I sat down on the grass. I turned my head, and there, right next to me was his ring.

Yeah. So Tom sent that message.

We had talked about whether we would be able to communicate after he died. The whole idea seemed so 1990 Ghost-y, so weird. But everything was so weird already that the conversation seemed rational. I wanted that dream to mean that Tom had found a way to reach out to me, and that I was receptive. But I had my doubts.

And then, the next night, this dream: I am driving my car and realize I don’t know how to get to my destination. My nav system doesn’t work. Fine, I love maps. I stop the car, open the glove box and look for a map. There is no map. For a moment, I think: Shit. I’m screwed. And then, just as suddenly, I am filled with…some combination of curiosity and energy and joy. I get to make this up. I get to find my way.

Thanks, T.

(photo credit: ME)