Last night I woke up around midnight, remembering that we didn’t change the smoke detector batteries when we set back the clocks. When I went back to sleep, I had three odd dreams, the last of which included a row of ringing rotary telephones like my mother’s—and like the one that appeared in a dream I had about my mother five years ago when she had pneumonia and was resisting going to the hospital. In that dream, there was no voice on the other end after the phone was picked up. I awoke with a start, suddenly clear that I needed to bring my mother to the hospital. In last night’s dream, I didn’t find the right phone in time to answer. When the ringing stopped, a voice said, “Something is wrong,” and I woke up.
Usually when I have a short vivid dream that includes a voice, it’s about something important. For example, eleven years ago, a week after I was diagnosed with a miscarriage, I had a dream that said, “It’s not over. It still 60% in you.” A few hours later, my doctor’s office called to say that recent test results indicated I had a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy (where the embryo is stuck in the fallopian tube) and to get to the hospital right away. There have been a few other dreams that have been eerily accurate, so when I heard, “Something is wrong” last night, I awoke a little freaked out. I remembered the earlier thought about the smoke detector batteries and took a 2am stroll around the house to make sure nothing was smoldering. I remembered the fact that it was a rotary phone, like the one in the dream about my mother, and thought of my elderly neighbor, whose grasp of reality is slipping. A few months ago, I heard her talking to herself outside at 3am, so last night I peeked out to her porch to make sure she wasn’t in some kind of jeopardy. All seemed calm; all seemed bright from the Christmas lights many neighbors still have up.
Today I’m marveling at the mystery of the unconscious mind, which is maddeningly symbolic and unspecific. There are times when the meaning of a dream is clear to me, but many more times when it is not. Often I don’t even try to find a meaning. When I do, I usually look for patterns and feelings. For example, both of the other dreams I had last night included some feeling of unease, but they were about totally different things, and neither was obviously related to the ringing phone. Driving the kids to school, my daughter mentioned having an odd dream herself last night. My son jumped in: “Yeah, I had a dream. I was shooting a squirrel with an AK47!” We all laughed, but I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that if dreams mean as much as I sense they do, I may be in for more than one kind of trouble.
This is really strange…I have had a few like this too. I think the more open people are to this type of thing, the more it happens to them. The only problem for me is that I rarely remember my dreams, so who knows what I have been dreaming about???!!!
Oh wow. Hope it’s nothing too serious if it does turn out to be a true warning. Have you found anything it could be about yet?
Thanks for your concern, Stephanie. There was something I learned about that day, which seemed like it might be the subject of the dream, but because it involved someone else I didn’t feel I could write about it. So it’s still not totally clear, but nothing terrible has happened either.