Dreams of death and dying?

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

3:27 AM

As a caretaker of a sick loved one….. Do you ever have Dreams about people dying???

I was woken up at 3 AM this morning by a dream that I’ve had pieces of before.   The dream was different, but the place was the same.  The people in it were foggy like the fog that circled my neighborhood  when I looked out  the window to see if my brother was awake.  It was one of those dreams that needed to be shared with others, so I wanted to talk to him.  He and his wife live downstairs and I was hoping he could help me make sense of the dream.

You see, I think the relative that has been visiting my almost 90 year old mother, who has dementia, also visited me last night in my dream.  How can I tell her she is delusional when I’m seeing the same people in my sleep as she is?   She truly has dementia,  and the delusions are getting worse as per the doctor.  When she is awake, my mother is talking about the fact that she is currently spending days visiting her mother-in-law and my father (who both have been deceased for years) in their hometown of Altoona.  At other times, she has been looking for them in her delusions in the “other Lorien – the one across the parking lot”.  There is no “other Lorien across the parking lot” in reality.   There are other Lorien buildings locally but several miles away which she could not have gotten to.  At one telling of it, according to her, my grandmother is in that building, and she visited her by walking over there, and my grandmother looks like “death warmed over”  because “You know, she is 117 years old”.  In reality, if my grandmother were alive, she would be 115, but who’s counting?  My father comes and goes in her dream/delusion, making her mad because occasionally he is with a “red head” and she is having his baby.  My mother, at this stage of her disease, has to be pushed in her wheelchair, so there is no way she could have gotten to Altoona by herself, or even the other, non-existent building, by herself.  These dreams/delusions have progressed from her complaints of having her room moved 6 times a night, and being visited by Navy men, and a fire in her room, so are a little milder in the panic area, so not worth 2 AM phone calls as she has done in the past.

I mean… weird stuff, right?  But is it?  I’m here as a 67 year old, mentally healthy Ph.D., physically fit for my age, and seeing the same people in my dream.   In my version of the dream, my mother is laying in a large house on top of a hill,  on the point of death,  with another person in the same house, “looking like death warmed over” and hanging onto the thread of life.  My siblings and I, could be my cousins, but they are definitely relatives (the foggy people, but that’s who I think they are) are visiting my mother as well as this other person.   We keep referring to the other person as Aunt Kate (who is also deceased already in real life), but in my awake state, I’m wondering if that person is truly my grandmother as in my mom’s delusions.  In my dream, I make the comment that it is strange that two sisters lie together, the oldest and youngest, however, Aunt Kate is not her sister but her sister-in-law.  Anyhow, my Mom passes on peacefully, yet this other person continues to hang onto the thread of life.

In another awake moment, I thought… maybe that 117 year old death warmed over almost corpse is really Mom’s deceased sibling named Kathryn?  This Kathryn supposedly only lived to be 7 years old and died right before my mother was born from whatever flu was going around back in the 1920’s.  According to her parents, Mom looked exactly like this Kathryn, and in my grandparents view she was the reincarnation of Kathryn.  So has Kathryn been haunting Mom’s dreams, and now mine? Either way… who is this almost deceased relative that visits both Mom and me?

In my dream, Mom passes, but the “sister” doesn’t and my dream ends with my siblings and I waiting outside the house on the hill at a fork in the road so we can point our cousins  to the way to park.  Something about the house where this all takes place looks familiar as I have been there before… but only in my dreams.    I vaguely remember being at the house before, and going up the hill ( but in the other dream it was clearly a mountain, not just a hill).  In that dream I was in Altoona visiting relatives, and had to find Aunt Kate’s house and took a long time finding it.  But when I arrived at the house it was this one, not Aunt Kate’s real house on 8th St.

Just wondering about the “stuff of dreams”  and what it all means.  Can we share deceased relatives in dreams?  Do we revisit other places in our dreams?   I remember when I first moved back to Maryland,  having recurring dreams involving a river, a raft, my friends Jenny & Michelle from Colorado, and riding that river and exploring an old abandoned house in the fork of that river.  The dreams were very similar, but our exploring of the house was different each time.  I had that dream several times over the next couple of years.   Of course, that was also the time period that my husband of 33  years had come out of the closet as transgendered, so my life was truly in flux at the time, so the river scenario made sense.

So why does this house on the hill recur?  In the previous dream I was lost… does that mean as I face mom’s disease process and coming demise, I’m lost again?  And what about the “Aunt” or “Grandmother”  occurring in both mom’s delusions, and my dream?  Is that only there as a power of suggestion from one to another?

This dream was powerful enough to wake me at 3 AM.  It didn’t seem like a threatening dream, and I didn’t wake scared or worried, just sad and curious about the meaning of it all.  So thought I’d write it down to share with others.

Any thoughts on the meaning or substance of dreams?   Any other stories of warnings or vistations before the death of a loved one?   Please share your stories……

Meanwhile… not that I’ve written this down… I’m back to dreamland…

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