Dreams, Death, and My Reality
My grandma died on 6th August, 2021 at 2:08 pm. A month earlier, sudden illness had struck her. She stayed at the hospital till the last of her days. I had the following dreams almost about seven months before her illness. I believe that both the dreams were my way of preparing myself emotionally for an unforeseeable, but rather foreseeable, reality of life.
With the first dream being the indicator of an upcoming tsunami, I’d like to narrate it first. This dream doesn’t really involve emotions – it’s rather event based, and that makes it all the more unexplainable. I wouldn’t have just guessed it that correctly, right?
Here’s my summarized version:
This dream involves an accident that leads to Nano (what I call my grandma) fainting. No one is able to wake her up, yet she’s not bleeding or has any kind of injuries – her eyes remain shut, and no words come out of her mouth either. Mom tries to contact an ambulance and surprisingly enough, somehow they’re unreachable. Mom tries multiple times, while we all stand there unable to do anything else to help. My uncle sits in the living room and weeps. Last resort: Mom calls my grandad, who passed away almost 6 years ago and we’re aware of that in the dream. She tells him about the situation, and he tells her that he’ll take Nano with him.
We’re all satisfied.
Now comes the second dream; the dream that blocked my inner being from thinking of anything else. This dream is highly emotional. The intensity of that emotion is beyond comparison – I’d define it as the kind that’d make you cry even when awake. It was unbearable.
In this dream it was already established that Nano is dead (seriously had this dream months before her illness). We were all sitting in the house she grew up in, surrounded by distant relatives. Everyone was crying, but I was crying like a maniac, much worse than the others. I do not understand it. I was crying not only because I was sad that she was no more, but also because seeing all these people I began feeling like I was missing a big portion of normal life.
I believe it doesn’t really matter, but for some reason it did in the dream. I was moved by it. Maybe deep down, somehow I’ve developed this mindless sorrow about not being as close to relatives, and especially enjoy my time with them, as my ancestors once did in their youth. The way elders narrate their experiences is what I’d blame for that. I wouldn’t say I am jealous, it’s more of an unexplainable desire. I feel isolated because of it, and it always seemed that if I had all those people, I wouldn’t feel that way.
Moreover, maybe I think that being the same as them, and successfully maintaining a good relationship with them are two separate things. They may be… but not really. Though, I do realize that it would cost me a lot. I’d have to give up my current life to have that. There’s no way to have both – it wouldn’t make sense to want both together. If I had been stuck in that life, this version of me would never exist. This version is the best version of me, I don’t want to lose this. I don’t mind not being able to have the life most people do. Maybe losing the way from time to time is just my teenage self fighting off the logic that grounds me.
In this dream, I cried; wept, begged everyone to convey the message I had been told to pass on by my grandma (I believed).
“How would you feel if your kids refused to spend time together?” I said.
Repeatedly, I was mentioning this. We had to be friends: we were the same blood. My constant emphasis over the thought made everyone quite emotional. They agreed to put away all differences and once again go back to being close relatives. There was a session of introductions that I don’t remember being part of. It was as if my job was done, and now I was just on the sidelines – smiling.
I have honestly, felt all these emotions deeply for a while now. Maybe that was why I was unable to write it down for so long. Despite all of it, I now realize that it was meaningless. Meaningless, because blood doesn’t connect us in any way other than the fact that heritage and genes carry certain programming instructions. Being raised in the same family, furthermore, just gives you the same values – the same socialization. Relatives are alike for that reason only. In that regard, we are better separated.
When my grandma died, these two dreams hit me in an insanely painful way. Maybe some of us tend to think that elders are the bridges between relationships. On their deaths, we realize that broken relationships are going to be even more difficult to fix from now onwards. I felt all those emotions on her death. It obviously didn’t feel right to not meet her relatives for life, naturally. The intensity of the emotions I felt in these dreams came back, connections were formed between what I felt now and then, I began to believe in such obviously incorrect conclusions. I have narrated these dreams countless times to close relatives in that time. I tried to be the person in that dream, believing that what I had seen in the second dream was noble. Reality is very different, and I hope my future self can realize and work through things like this better than I did.
Delusions, false patterns, getting lost in feelings, are not attributes that I can be associated with in reality. Whatsoever it may be; dreams about death and my internal fears linked to them; or being surrounded by too many believers of false patterning, I must stay grounded in my reality instead.
Name: Marrium Marwah
Branch: Future world school BTR Rawalpindi
Grade: As Level