At 4:24 this morning I woke from a dream about being in my parent’s house in Vernon NJ shortly after purchase back in the 1970’s. It was around 4:30 PM and the middle of winter, based on the feeling of things and the light coming through the white curtains covering the double sliding glass door in the downstairs family room across from where I had apparently been drunk and sleeping. “I was not me in this dream!”
A bunch of vague thoughts went through my mind about getting caught doing something with another family member I shouldn’t be, as I searched for my bottle of Blackberry Brandy, which I finally located on an end table next to the sofa I had been sleeping on. The bottle was nearly empty and right next to the phone, which was one of those old rotary phones, this one being black.
Whoever I was, in this vision I was older and very concerned that I might be caught committing an act of incest by a father I clearly feared. I was also very concerned that while I was asleep, I may have missed an important call. I’m not sure how old I was though. I knew I was buzzed from the alcohol and an adult male, but that’s about all. It was as if the dream had intentionally been interrupted via some sort of intervention or at the very least an internal defense mechanism as, “I didn’t get any further than what I just wrote!”
I suddenly woke to the sound of my own iPhone ringing, which uses a ring tone similar to those old rotary phones from that era. I was stunned when I checked the time that anyone would be calling so insistently, me thinking that whoever was calling had just hung up and called again after getting my voicemail on their first attempt.
The phone had stopped ringing for the second time as I finally fully woke, me also feeling like someone was in the bedroom of this apartment with me who wasn’t exactly friendly, which was a bit disconcerting in and of itself. But I reluctantly got out of bed anyway, my brain racing at that point, and found that no one had called my phone at all. As I stood there at my desk with my phone in hand, I walked myself back through the events that I could recall that had brought me to stand there.
The presence I felt dissolved from the space around me after about a minute, too. As I stood there next to my desk, I realized right away that the perceived ringing of my iPhone was no accident and intended to prevent the dream, vision, or whatever you want to call it from continuing.
It’s not the first time that I have had visions from the prospective of other people, some dreams being nice and others not so nice. But I will never understand what triggers me to awaken from one dream and not another. Is it just my own brain making the selection as to what I need protection from and don’t or is there another facet to the process rooted deep within the superconscious. “I may never know.”
What I do know is, I’m now curious like George. Who was I back in the 1970’s in this vision? Why was I sleeping in the basement of my parent’s house if I didn’t live there? Who was I behaving inappropriately with?
I could just write the whole thing off as my brain running amuck and just forget about the whole thing. That would be very easy to do these days. But I can’t do that either because, even now as I write this, I know damn well this wasn’t exactly an ordinary dream I seemed to have been kicked out of before I got more information. It feels like an old memory from long ago trying to surface and, “Now I want to know what the hell that memory is.”
If the whole thing turns out to be my imagination simply being off kilter, “That’s fine.” But my gut has been telling me all day, “That’s just not the case.”
But, if my suspicions are correct and it’s an old memory of importance, one thing is certain. There will be more dreams and visions as, “The awakening has begun!”