Date: 25-09-2020 

Introduction:

Last night was a complicated dream experience, that morphed into a lucid experience a few times. I was in realities in between realities, and moved up and down multiple layers. Because it was so complicated and all seemed to take place in a short time span I was unable to recollect most of it. The lucid moments were short and each time they immediately shifted me into another layer making me lose the lucid part. A few important things stand out. I think I was able to capture enough of the experience to give an impression of how hectic and random it was.

Unchangeable:

The first impression I have was of a sunset in Ermelo. I was walking on the street in front of the primary school near my grandfather’s and grandmother’s old house. Suddenly I was no longer in Ermelo but in China. The area was slightly mountainous, there was a lot of grass. It still had elements of Ermelo, though. The sun was setting and I was taking it in, when suddenly my brother appeared near me. He told me that the sun always sets twice here in China. And he was right. I saw one sun disappear behind the horizon, and when it was gone a second sun followed it. But that second sun looked fake, like it was the sun from a painting.

It didn’t radiate. It kind of looked like a school project sun made out of crepe paper. I then became lucid, and realised this was a dream. That sun looked too fake, and I realised I was not in China, but my brother was! I looked at him, and realised that he looked exactly like my dad as I had seen him in an earlier dream, when my dad looked a lot younger. M looked back at me, and we hugged each other in a long embrace. It had been the better part of a year since I had last seen him, as he had been stuck in China due to lockdowns all this time. It really felt like him, even though he was somehow a blend of him and our dad.

I also recall that the moment I saw him, I realised that M was the most like our dad, but I meant it not in appearance but in character. How he behaves, how he acts. It was something I realised on a level so deep that I had never seen this before. This moment suddenly shifted again and I found myself in the living room of my parents’ house. The whole family was there, so both my parents and both my siblings. I was no longer lucid. We were all talking, having little private one on ones with each other, like we used to have sometimes during tea. Everyone talked. Dad was talking to me, and I wasn’t really paying attention to him.

I was trying to follow a conversation between my mother and my brother. My sister also was listening in, but she didn’t add to that conversation much and was ignored by the others when she did. I could hear my mother was performing her shtick again. She was creating divisiveness between the members of the family, as she has always done. As I saw through her spiel, I thought to myself I didn’t want to get pulled into another one of her games. Meanwhile my dad had kept asking things, and I had answered him in the shortest way possible, with yes/no/maybe/don’t know kind of answers. I do not recall what he was asking though, but I was not engaging with him.

He persisted, though. Then, suddenly, my mom looked at me all annoyed and asked me: “Who are you talking to the whole time?” And again I became lucid. I realised: “Wait a second! Dad is dead. And she can’t see him, but I can, because this is a dream!” In that fraction of a second as this realisation kicked in, it gave me an adrenaline rush, which was bringing me to the waking world. I woke up, but not before looking at dad and seeing him look at me with a slight smile while saying with a calm and friendly voice: “You can’t change her. She doesn’t want to.” And then I woke up in my bed, his face fresh on my retina, his words still echoing in my ears.

 

Analysis:

The next morning I asked my brother (who was still in China at that moment) if he had perhaps dreamt anything in particular. I was hoping that maybe he had seen me in his dream. How cool would that have been!? But alas. No, he did not. Though he did relate to me that while in China he had often taken strolls along side the river and watched many sunsets during his stay in China. From what I experienced in the dream it is easy to tell how much I missed him, especially during the death of our dad. The insight he was most like our dad has stuck with me.

The end message by my dad in this dream is quite clear. Though I will address one thing. Technically you could say the thing my dad told me can be interpreted one of two ways. I cannot change her. She doesn’t want to. It can mean she doesn’t want me to change her, or it can mean she doesn’t want to change, period. I feel confident to say he meant the latter. Even in Dutch, if he had meant the prior, it would’ve made sense to say it slightly differently. He would’ve put more emphasis on the word ‘you’ than he did if so. This translates one on one to Dutch by the way. I am quite sure he meant she is just simply unwilling to change. And I think he is right.