Can DREAMS be interpreted and tell us something special?
I’ve had a few vivid dreams from my childhood which I still remember, and I thought about writing them down once and for all. I believe I was about 4-5 years old when I had these dreams, and I have no idea if they mean anything in particular.
Dream 1 – Left behind in a cafeteria
The dream starts in a cafeteria where my parents, my two older brothers (1,5 years and 4 years older than me respectively) and I were having a “fika” (normally coffee if you’re an adult, or a sweet drink if you’re a child – together with maybe a cinnamon bun, a few cookies, a sandwich or similar). The cafeteria is adjoined to a large store, and we are the only ones in the cafeteria.
My parents suddenly rise and leave for the exit door and I’m the only one who notices it. I get frightened and I immediately warn my brothers about the situation. They race after our parents and they manage to catch them just as they are leaving through the exit door. I’m struggling desperately to run after them but – as it often happens in dreams – it’s like running in heavy mud. My legs seem to weigh several tons and I can hardly move them. In the large window to the right hand side of the exit door I can see our light blue car leaving with my family members in it. They had apparently forgotten about me and I feel so sad and desperate. I take a look around me to see if I can see some service personnel who might be able to help me in this store that seems to be void of both buyers and sellers. The store is about to close, and maybe that’s also the reason why my parents left? I do find a salesperson by my side and I desperately ask her “My family has left me behind! Can you help me?!”. She replies with no emotions “I’m sorry but we’re closing now”, and then she turns around and leaves me while the entire store gets really dark when all the electric lights are turned off and all the doors automatically close. I’m standing there all alone in a very dark store, in between some shelves, and I know that I have to spend the entire night there.
Dream 2 – Saved by a swing
My brothers and I were close to a little lake (it might have been somewhere on my father’s premises) and there was also one lady in our company who I can’t identify. Maybe it was a relative, or maybe she was a friend of the family. I don’t believe it was my mother. In order to reach the water of the tiny lake one would have to go down a steep dirt cliff which was all around the lake. I noticed a large yellow plastic bowl/container on the edge of the cliff, and I thought to myself that I should not go near it or else I might slide down the cliff. Unfortunately it didn’t seem like I had a choice in the matter because I ended up too close to this plastic bowl and of course I found myself rapidly sliding down the cliff toward the water – and I hadn’t learned how to swim yet. The lake was tiny but I knew it was very deep. Just when I was about to fall in the water a swing suddenly appeared just beside me, and the strings to which it was attached reached all the way up to heaven. I sat down on the swing and I found myself swinging back and forth over the tiny lake a few times while watching my brothers and this lady on the other side of the lake where they were busy in a deep conversation. Or rather, my brothers listened attentively to this lady who gave them many compliments and if I remember it correctly she also said some negative things about me. They proceeded to leave the area and none of them gave me a second thought, and they didn’t even take a glance at me. My brothers gladly followed this lady, despite being aware of that their sister was no longer with them. If I remember the dream correctly, they even knew that I was in danger but they didn’t care. I had no other choice but to keep swinging over the lake, and I also started to realize that the whole swing construction was slowly sinking…
Imaginations
Maybe it’s common for some children to experience “imaginations” (having illusions/hallucinations) under the age of 5 during night-time. I know I was not the only one, and I know that my son experienced such things when he was a young child. I also remember one summer when I was a teenager and took care of some children – one of them a little girl who imagined that there were scary things in her room at nights. She was about 3,5 years old and sometimes during the night I rushed into her room if I heard that she was afraid of something that she saw. I used to stand beside her bed to speak to her until she calmed down. Once when I came into her room and spoke to her she eventually asked me to “take her away”. “Who?”, I asked. “The girl right beside you”, was her answer. I realized that she saw another girl just like me in her room and we were standing right beside each other looking at her. Fortunately the other girl left once I turned on the lights.
I imagined scary things in my room when I was a small child, and that’s why I didn’t want to go to bed. I often felt that I was absorbed into the pillow. Sometimes I could hear the steps of heavy boots coming from the old barn on our farm, and slowly but unmistakably they would take the route toward our house. I knew the steps were coming for me as soon as I started to hear them and I was terrified! My room was placed in the near back of the house and I could hear the loud steps slowly walking around the house until they were right under my window, and from there they went up into my window and then – explosion of various colors and I was paralyzed with fear. Maybe I would also feel that the intruder poked me, and it felt so real.
Once I screamed for my mom because I saw a bunch of spiders on my floor. My mother happened to step on a few of them and the ones she stepped on disappeared. I encouraged her to continue until they were all gone. She told me that they were only hallucinations, but I didn’t care what she called them. I just wanted them out of my room. I stayed corrected and I often called for my mom to remove some “hallucinations” from my room which I started to call them.
Once when I was a teenager I saw a strange image/illusion which scared me half to death even though it was so innocent. I couldn’t sleep and I watched my big toe that was the only part of my foot free from the bed covers. I wiggled with it once in a while before I moved my foot back into the covers. The toe was still wiggling in the same place! It freaked me out totally…Probably because it looked so incredibly real – just as real as any other object in my room.
Once I spent a few days in my grandparent’s house, and I was not allowed to have the lights on during the nights. If they only knew what sort of nightmares and imaginations that I had to suffer through, I’m sure they wouldn’t be so adamant about it. Just asking them if I could please have the lights on was not enough to convince them, and maybe I failed to tell them WHY I so desperately wanted to have the lights on. My grandparents belonged to the generation where lights were supposed to be shut off during the night when people were supposed to sleep. What reason would there be to have lights turned on in the middle of the night? I knew that obedient children were supposed to be quiet and sleep at night (I didn’t want to get criticism for having disturbed my grandparents in the middle of the night), so I had to accept whatever the dreadful nights had in store for me and that was a lot. Once I had to watch the whole floor getting filled with large rats that hurried around everywhere, including climbing on chairs and other furniture. There wouldn’t be any use to say “thank goodness they are at least not real”, because they looked just as real to me as anything else in the room. I could of course close my eyes, and I usually did, but it was hard to keep them closed for a longer period of time. No matter what my eyes would detect and how scared I would become, I knew that I was not supposed to wake anyone up for support.
When cars drove by, which didn’t happen so often in the middle of the night, I could see reflections on my wall from the lights in the windows and sometimes I could see these imaginary reflections moving across the walls even though no cars were driving by. Once I saw a movie on my wall! The “film screen” was a large square-shaped “reflection” right beside my bed, and I was amazed by what I saw. The film was in slow motion, and naturally it was a horror movie. A man was sitting in an armchair reading a newspaper, and behind him was a door. It was very dark in the room but a lamp radiated at least some light. Since the man was sitting with his back toward the door, he couldn’t see what took place behind him. He couldn’t see that the handle of the door started to get pressed down, but I could see it. The door handle slowly moved downward, and eventually also the man started to realize that someone was at the door since he dropped the newspaper (in slow motion) and his wide eyes expressed pure terror. I too was out of my wits with fear, and I saw the door slowly started to open behind this man. Just when I was about to see who was behind the door I couldn’t take it any more but hid under the covers. I was very afraid by this film, but no matter how terrified I was, I knew I had to face such imaginations all alone because good girls don’t wake people up in the middle of the night.
Sleep paralysis and RH-negative blood?
I wonder how common it is to wake up after a night’s sleep before the body wakes up? I experienced this a couple of times when I was about 15-16 and it was very uncomfortable to wake up and being totally unable to move any part of my body. I couldn’t move a finger and I couldn’t make a sound. I was wide awake, it was late in the morning (about 10-11 am), the sun was shining through the window, I could hear the wind outside and I was completely unable to move. Had it been in the middle of the night I would have been terrified.
I read a testimony from a person who has had “out of body experiences”, and she explained that it started with a body paralysis which she had during the day when she took a nap. She started to be frightened and it was during the stage when she couldn’t stand it any more as she realized that she started to rise toward the ceiling and looked down on her own body. I have no idea if she is telling the truth or not but at least I know that I’m not lying about my sleep paralysis. I wonder what would have happened if I too ended up in a desperate state of mind? A friend of mine also told me about one sleep paralysis experience and a consequent experience of looking down at himself from the ceiling.
I’ve experienced sleep paralysis twice while waking up, but I’ve experienced it several times when I’m about to fall asleep (even if it was years ago since I last had this type of experience). Both types are very uncomfortable! It’s scary to experience the very second that you make the transit into sleep (not being able to move or draw back), and it’s also scary to wake up without being able to move. There are scientific terms for these experiences:
“If it occurs while you are falling asleep, it’s called hypnagogic or predormital sleep paralysis. If it happens as you are waking up, it’s called hypnopompic or postdormital sleep paralysis.”
I’ve read that people with RH-negative blood (about 7% of the population) are more prone to “paranormal activities” than others. Some traits for people with RH-negative blood are reported to be: a feeling of not belonging, being a truth seeker, predominantly having blue or green eyes , love for space and science, unexplained scares, high blood pressure, higher than average IQ, ability to disrupt electrical devices, experience of unexplained phenomenon, empathy and compassion for mankind, etc. I wonder if there is a connection, because I have RH-negative blood.
Out of body experiences are very common during near death experiences, and people have given support for their experiences by summarizing what they have seen and heard to those who were present in the same room. I’ve read a few NDE experiences where the dying person describes a silver thread between his dead body and the “soul” (the “me”) from the ceiling of the room where he/she looks down on himself/herself.
Eccl. 12:6 Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
