Sitting next to my husband in a truck driving south. I could see the Rocky mountains out the open window to my right. I could feel the warm summer breeze in my hair. There was music playing on the radio and a little boy around the age of seven was sitting on my other side looking out the open window. We were giving him a ride...somewhere. I'd just turned to my husband to tell him something inane when the brightest white light I've ever seen suddenly exploded somewhere in front of us. There was no sound with the explosion...only the intense white light. I closed my eyes and grabbed my husband's leg reflexively, my immediate thought that I'd somehow gone spontaneously blind. But, at almost the same time I felt my husband grasp harder to the steering wheel as he said "Oh shit" in a tone of voice I'd never heard him use before and the realization struck us both at the same time what the white light meant.
Knowing we had only an instant before we died, I was suddenly desperate for him to know how very important he's been to me. Still blind, I screamed "I love you!" but there was no air. I took great gulping breaths of nothing. It was as if every molecule of oxygen had disappeared with the flash of light. All sound was gone from the world and my lungs wouldn't expand; there was nothing to fill them. I kept trying to scream I love you as I felt the truck lift off the ground and fling effortlessly sideways with an unbelievable force before everything went dark.
Of course this didn't "actually" happen. I didn't die in a nuclear explosion that flattened Denver. But I'll now carry the memory of Death by Warhead in my memory for the rest of my life. Not as a memory of a dream I had one Sunday in August, but the memory of actually dying by an atomic bomb.
Normally, he's in bed with me when I have these types of dreams and he's kind enough to wake me up when he realizes that I'm in the middle of one and then take the time to reassure me that it's not real until I can calm down enough to go back to sleep. But, this time, he'd got up early with the dogs (0530, their usual weekday wake up time) so that I could sleep in. I woke up immediately after the dream, obviously shaken and laid in bed for a few minutes trying to reassure myself with my usual mantra of "it was just a dream...it was just a dream" before heading downstairs to tell him about it. And, even though I felt a little more settled in myself when I started to recount the dream to him, I found myself shaking and sobbing and gasping for breath as if I were recounting an event that had just happened, not sharing something that transpired only in my head. While I don't feel as raw now one day later, that feeling of panic is still lurking just below the surface ready to rise back up if I look at it too closely.
I've had violent dreams like this for as long as I can remember. They used to utterly confound my mother as we didn't have a television for most of my childhood and, growing up in a cult-like religion, our exposure to the world was extremely limited thereby giving no possible basis for my dreams to have come from some outside influence such as a horror movie, a book or...the news.
And these dreams aren't like normal dreams that fade in a few days the details of which remain just outside of your grasp, fuzzy, slipping away as you wake up. No. These dreams are in technicolor and I wake from them as if I'm literally experiencing the events in real time. The unsettled feeling can last for days, the intensity never subsiding but instead turning into a memory of an event that feels like it actually happened, not like remembering a dream. So real, in fact, that I keep a separate journal of these dreams because I often need to verify the difference between the events I dream and those that actually happened because the quality of the memory isn't a memory of a dream, but the memory of an event as real as my wedding or the birth of my children.
Because they're so real, I've often wondered if there are different dimensions in which these events actually occur. Timelines, lifetimes that run parallel to the one in which I find myself typing this update. I can't explain where they come from. Can't connect their occurrence to stress in my life, movies I've watched, books I've read, conversations I've had, medication changes, lack of sleep...I've tried every reasonable and logical explanation and continue to come up short.
I'm not crazy...my mom had me tested (Big Bang Theory reference here). But I have no explanation. I don't even know who to ask. Or what.
Is this common for empaths?
Is it common for shamans?
Is it common for intuitives in general?
Does everyone experience dreams that are so real that live rent free in their memories now as events that occurred?
Therapists tell me that it's related to stress (it's not, at least for me), that I should get on a regular sleep schedule (I am), or that I need to watch more calming movies before bed (okay, they may have a point there as we often watch horror movies before bed). But, seriously, I've never found an answer that makes any more sense to me than the parallel universes theory. I'd love to hear if this is common for my followers. At least maybe we're in good company...? Hastag silver lining...nah.
