An Unusual Visitation.

I am conscious of the fact that I sometimes rely too heavily on the content of unusual dreams to provide blogging material, but I’m going to do so again because last night’s dream was unusually odd even by my standards.

I was sitting in the living room of a house in which I lived for nearly ten years before moving to Derbyshire in 2002. I was aware that my mother, who died three years after I moved to that house, also lived there but had gone to bed. She never lived there with me in life.

I looked out of the window to see my father (my natural father who separated from my mother when I was five) approaching the house dressed in a long white smock. He came in, sat on the sofa, and we talked, but I remember nothing of the conversation. My father died in 1991, a little over a year before I moved there.

At some point my mother came downstairs also dressed in a white smock, and engaged my father in conversation. Again, I remember nothing of what was said and eventually they went upstairs together and that was the end of the dream.

When I woke up after 8½ hours of unbroken sleep (which is, in itself, most uncharacteristic of me these days) I began to wonder what such a dream could mean. I don’t recall ever having dreamt about either parent before, so why now? I thought it likely that the white smocks – which I never saw either of them wear in life – represented the fact that they are both deceased. I further assumed that my mother was inside the house because she was alive when I moved there, but my father had to approach from the outside because he was dead by then. That much seemed rational.

But why were they there at all? Was my unconscious mind trying to tell me something (rather like the black dog which leapt out of the wall shortly before I received the cancer diagnosis)? Was the universe trying to tell me something? Were my parents trying to pass on some message from over there in the undiscovered country? Or was it all the product of a fertile imagination which likes to construct odd stories?

That’s the problem, isn’t it? We never know.

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Incidentally, I encountered the angel in the shoe shop again today. I told her that she was now a celebrated person on account of having been the subject of a blog post. She seemed amused but unimpressed. And that’s life.