I’m amazed when people tell me they don’t pay attention to their dreams. I learned to pay attention to dreams early on. This happened when I first dreamt of the truck.
The truck first appeared in my dreams when I was a boy. I’d be dreaming about the shore or about ice cream when out of nowhere I’d hear the sound of a truck. Sometimes I would see the truck approaching me from a distance. Panic would set in but at least in the dream I knew what to do: lay face down on the ground until the truck passed. If I did that, I’d stay safe. If not, the feeling was that something awful would happen to me. The truck dreams continued into my early thirties, but by this time the experience had become routine: when I heard the truck, I’d hit the ground and cover my eyes until the danger was over.
Why was I dreaming of a truck? The truck was always the same truck: an old fashioned looking brown dump truck with a lot of frontal grill work. The fact that these truck dreams had been with me since childhood and were now still occurring in my thirties was of some concern. One day I told my mother about it.
“A horrible looking truck,” I said, “keeps pursuing me in dreams.”
At that, mom told me a story. She said that when I was a baby she was pushing me in a stroller across a hilly Manayunk street when a truck appeared at the summit and came barreling towards her. With no time to spare, Mom said she pushed the stroller out of the way but the roaring vehicle still managed to clip her slightly from behind. The injury, while not appearing serious at first, would work its damage in later years so that she had to have several back surgeries. In my toddler’s mind, I must have retained the visual memory of the truck speeding towards us so that in dreams I kept seeing it as an impending threat.
I thanked mom for effectively ending the reoccurring dream, because once I conceptualized what the truck meant, that was it. It never appeared in my dreams again.
Dreams can take many forms. Some dreams, in fact, can predict the future and some can act as links between the living and the dead.
The great seer Edgar Cayce once wrote that “dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”
Dreams that predict the future hit me years ago when I dreamt that my good friend Gary was in the hospital. Disturbed as to why this very lucid dream was so clear, I called Gary the next day but was promptly told by his wife that he had injured himself on the job and was recuperating in a hospital. Astounded at the accuracy of the dream, from then on I began to keep a dream log, even recording nonsensical dreams that seemed more like Salvador Dali collages than anything prophetic.
Some years ago, while on an overnight journalistic assignment in Atlantic City, I spent the night in an old Victorian house. The next morning my mind was filled with images from an intense dream in which a Catholic nun in a traditional habit had put her cheek close to mine while giving me a hug. Why had I dreamt of a nun? What did a nun have to do with writing about Atlantic City’s nightlife? I received the answer when the manager of the house took me on a tour of the place and showed me a glass stained window near the staircase. The design in the glass was religious in nature. He then told that the house had been a convent in the 1920s.
Had a deceased nun from that time reached out through the veil of space and time?
Once I dreamt that I attended my own funeral. It took me a week to recover from this one.
I was sitting cross legged in the center aisle of the church where my funeral mass was taking place. It must have been winter because the church was full of people in long, dark coats. My deceased father was sitting beside me in the aisle with my coffin just a few feet away. On the floor beside me was a glass of wine and all my diaries (I’ve been keeping diaries since the 1970s, meaning that I can find out what I was doing on any given month when I was 26 years old). My father was leafing through the diaries as the priests at the altar prayed for my soul. Through it all, I was feeling just fine. I even helped myself to a sip of wine.
When my developmentally disabled younger brother, David John, was dying of bone cancer ten years ago, I dreamt that my dead great aunt, Dora, “taxied” me away in her Chevrolet Impala. She drove at great speed to an unknown designation. This was obviously a red letter emergency! The destination proved to be a big house where I was suddenly transported into a kitchen where I saw another dead aunt, Catherine, helping my deceased mother with a variety of foods and baked goods. The women were frantically arranging baked bread, casseroles, roast turkey, vegetables, all of them rushing about as if preparing a big dinner party. The dream made sense a day later when David John died. The obvious interpretation here was that the family was getting ready to welcome David John to the other side.
Last year I dreamt that a young married couple at my parish church was getting a divorce. At the time this idea seemed ludicrous. The parish looked on this couple as ideal married types; from my perspective the couple seemed to be on a perpetual honeymoon. I recorded the dream in my diary then promptly forgot about it until they moved out of state. Time passed, and then I heard through a parishioner that the iconic sweethearts were in fact filing for a divorce.
Sometimes dreams can pinpoint catastrophic national events.
In the 1970s, I dreamt that while walking downtown I saw several jet liners fall out of the sky. In the 1970s I was always dreaming of crashing airplanes. I’d be walking somewhere outside when out of the blue I’d see a jet flying low over in the sky and then see it plunge to the earth. In this dream in which several planes crashed at once, I saw something else: hundreds of men running around speaking Arabic. At the time I had no interest in the Middle East but the memory of this dream came back to haunt after 9/11. It was then that I felt a curious ‘referential’ ah ha moment.
Today my dreams are just as strange but in a different way. I don’t dream of crashing airplanes but of boarding airplanes, and then walking through strange desolate cities with luggage to a “new” apartment in a partially bombed out building. I have no idea what these dreams mean, if anything, but the fact that there’s always a lot of dilapidated, war torn buildings in them is a little disconcerting.
Consider this recent dream:
I see a devastated landscape, much like a former war zone with buildings partially intact. The military is nearby. There’s a house where many of the rooms are in ruins—fallen walls, debris, dirt, exposed plumbing. This is where I live but I also recognize it as the place where I have lived in other dreams. I recognize the ruined living room with no bathroom and the sound of constantly running water. The scene changes and I am a passenger in a car driving through groups of small children wandering the streets as if lost. There’s a feeling that everyone here has made peace with this awful new world.
In another dream, I’m walking in an ashen, devastated city. Most of the high-rise structures have holes in them. Some are half standing while other buildings are stained with a depressing gray color. The city seems to be smoldering after a great disaster. Families and large groups of people carry suitcases and walk through the city. Nobody appears to be talking in these processions. I am walking to the outskirts of town to another dilapidated area where my apartment house is located. In the dream I tell myself that I’ve been here before. I know this place.
With that said, I think it’s time for me to go out and get some ice cream. •
