The other day, or last Thursday, i dreamt of someone who had long been dead, and he said something, and i thought —

yeah, that’s right, but why did he say that? didn’t he die — and that’s when i woke up.

Some friends of mine went to a manghuhula (soothsayer) last Wednesday. (They’re successful professionals, very rational, they just go to a fortuneteller when they’re tired of going to the movies). So last Friday, while chillin’ around, i told them about dreaming of someone who had died. And one said, “Oh, the dead is trying to communicate with you!”.

So, i hadn’t expected that kind of interpretation. The dead do not come back. and i never really think of the dead in that manner. Whenever i write about the dead, it’s as a literary device, called “magic realism” — or so i try. (In the other blog, there’s an attempt at an overall, mild doppelganger literary device but people think it’s literal, which is amusing)

So i said : Whenever the dream isn’t logical, i wake up. Such as, whenever i dream i’m a student in A.S. again (arts and sciences) looking for my classroom i get confused because i think, why am i here again? – i’m already practising; and that’s when i wake up.

And my friend said, “that’s not true, your subconscious is your clearest, truest sense of what you have in mind…”.

I think that’s a better way of looking at it.

Your subconscious will not lie to you. You may have galactic illusions about yourself but your subconscious will tell you, nah – you’re as small as an ant.

Check.

So….

This is what that dream meant:

The dead come back as memories, and when we see them, we think of what might have been. We think we’ve mourned them, and we did; countless times; we grieved so much we got numb. But we got to a better place after that; your reality became better; your hopes came true. Still.

No matter how far we have gone, the yearning to hear from that person never goes away; the wish that he hadn’t died too early to see how we turned out, never leaves us; we want to get back to that place again when he was well and alive because, even if we knew then, and know now, that we made the right decisions, and do not regret a single day of it, we think: we could have avoided certain turns, we think we could have been clearer, we think we could have taken our time more.

Dreaming of a person who has died, for me, is simple.

It’s a wish that that person were still alive so he could see us, and tell us: “kid, this was what i was trying to tell you. You sure have a longish, roundabout way of understanding it.”