INTRO

I'd like to offer some dreams about the sudden deaths of close friends. So many people have told me of "knowing" or dreaming when a friend or family member passed on... but although I am a shaman, I usually don't recognize how my own dreams react to a close one's death--not until after the fact.

KAREN'S MURDER

Nearly twenty years ago, my friend Karen was raped and murdered. No one was ever convicted. Shortly before I found out she'd been killed, I had this brutally straightforward dream:

Karen got flushed down the toilet.

D'S SUICIDE

About two weeks ago, my close friend D killed herself. It's brought Karen to my mind again. I've been looking at two dreams I had around the time of her death, but before I knew.

1: WHAT HAVE I LOST?

I am moving my luggage from one place to the other (I was doing this at the time in waking life). I realize I am missing something. I'm upset about this, but my father says "Hey, it's only money." (Something he has in fact said before.) But I feel that something important was stolen from me, and the feeling persists when I wake.

2: STRANDED IN THE DESERT

I'm travelling, and I've come to a place where I just can't go on. I'm camping on the outskirts of a city in the desert. It seems like a former French territory--Algeria? I ask about bus connections, but I find there is no bus or train; I feel stranded. Uneasy, too. When I ask, people are not helpful--even unfriendly. It feels like hostile territory. There is more to this dream that I can't remember. Waking up felt like a climb out of very, very deep sleep, and all the while I was thinking of Paris, the exact opposite of this dry dream-city. Even after I think I'm fully awake, images of this desert kept flashing into my mind. It seemed like Palestine--a place of suffering.

INTERPRETATION (before I learned about D's death)

I thought "Stranded in the Desert" expressed anxieties around my upcoming travel plans. Will I make the right connections? Should I even travel at all? I'm joining the Longest Walk, a group of Native Americans walking from California to Washington. The group will be in the desert by the time I meet with them again. I wonder if I can stand the rigors of the walk. And there is a fair amount of suffering attached to Native sites and communities in this land.

IN HINDSIGHT

Now I wonder.

• That hostile, colonized North African city: D was African American and very aware that her skin color gave her a 'colonized' status in this country. And she was involved with a man who I believe has Mideastern ancestry, maybe Algerian.
• Feeling stuck, stranded, at the end of the line: did some of D's despair at her 'not making the connections' she needed in life filter through to me before she went into her final sleep?

Of course, I may just be reaching for connections between her life and my dream here. Suicide tends to leave survivors saying "I should have known" or "I should have done something", and this may be my way of convincing myself that on some level I did hear her call for help even if I couldn't do anything for her.

And yet... while I do see elements of myself in the dreams, the imagery also had a "foreign" quality I associate with psychic dreams. For instance, Algeria isn't a usual part of my inner landscape.

3: JU-JU

I've wondered if D might show up in my dreams, as other people sometimes have after their death.

Last night I dreamed of a teenage girl who was doing some kind of ju-ju around me. I was not entirely comfortable with it. I woke up feeling that it was okay to communicate with D for a while after her death, but unhealthy to cling to her; it might slow her down, make her hang around here too long.

WHAT NOW?

I've decided to stay here in San Francisco for a day or so more, to cope with D's death before I take off to join the walk. My intuition is still telling me to go, but to take my time.

--Cory

Right: ink sketch of Cory by Wayan

EDITOR'S NOTE

A big argument against psychic dreams is: "If we can dream of the future, why don't we dream clearly and prevent disasters when we wake?" Cory's dreams seem typical: they seem to sense trouble, but they weren't a clear call to action.

But clear warnings do come now and then; Sally Rhine Feather's book The Gift studies over 400 of them detailed enough to be useful. Yet shockingly few got acted on--only one-third! Why? Fear of mockery, a distaste for the irrational, lack of opportunity (how do you halt a scheduled plane flight?) But when warnings were acted on, two thirds of the time that action paid off. Clear warning-dreams can save lives--if heeded!

What if there simply is no action? The Stroke is a powerful example how a psychic dream can be clear, literal and accurate, yet futile--except to prepare you for an unavoidable loss.

Another type: in one of the best-known psychic dreams on record, Ferdinand's Assassination, Bishop Lanyi dreamt he got an animated postcard from his ex-student Ferdinand stating baldly "I'm going to be killed today"--and asking the bishop to pray for him. Not to warn anyone, not to save him! The prediction was detailed, showing Ferdinand's risky behavior (an open car driving narrow streets in a hostile town); Bishop Lanyi could have used it to try and and prevent the assassination. He didn't. He took the dream at face value. Rescue was not wanted. If Ferdinand knew he was going to die, he accepted it, and didn't ask to be saved. And he trusted his unworldly friend not to "save" him--except spiritually.

Is it possible this happens more often than we realize--we fail to see clearly or we fail to act because we might save "victims" who in fact embrace their deaths, need to move on? Having had hundreds of apparently predictive dreams, some indirect, symbolic and useless, others clear and useful, and some clear yet STILL useless, I advance this theory just because I can't frame any others that fit my data.

We may only have useful warning dreams if no one objects to being saved! The rest of the time, we may be denied useful details precisely because than we might interfere. Metaphoric dreams are one solution--they prepare us emotionally without letting us meddle. Karen gets flushed down the toilet--and notice the metaphor's more than a disguise. It expresses anger and disgust too, over the failure to catch her killer. It's not a newsflash; it's a bitter editorial. Meaningful... after the fact. Jung advance this same argument about non-psychic dreams, challenging Freud's idea of dream-distortions as disguise. The symbolism isn't noise--it's signal too!

If I'm right, you'll get clear, usable dream-warnings only when you...

1. are unable to affect the outcome
2. can affect the outcome, but no one minds your meddling
3. are able to refrain from action if others don't want saving. That takes an intuitive sensitivity and restraint that's rare in our activist era! I couldn't have done what Bishop Lanyi did.

All this applies to warnings of nonfatal trouble, too. The famously inconsistent nature of dream ESP may an artifact of a political problem--lack of consensus among affected parties!

It's enough to make you give up on the whole can of worms and go back to being a skeptic--unless you've had one of those compelling, detailed dreams that is unambiguously psychic. Cory mentions the definite sense of "outsiderness" an experienced dreamworker gradually learns to associate with such dreams. They're identifiable even if their images don't give you anything useful--useful to convince skeptics, OR useful in helping to save a friend.

Who may not want saving.

--Chris Wayan

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