Three Dreams of Premonition
Have you ever had a dream come true? I’m talking about the nighttime, sleeping type of dream, when images and symbols move across a deep screen below your waking mind — have they ever moved into the sunshine of reality during the next day? They have for me. Premonitions, heralds of the future, or coincidence, I don’t know, but here’s the true story of three dreams that came true . . . . .
The real-life backstory: My mother has died, she was unmarried and unpartnered, and I’m an only child. I am recently divorced, have two children, and am working full time in a demanding job. My mother’s apartment in Florida is full of beautiful things - furniture, art, rugs - but empty of a person, just as she left it on the day of her sudden, traumatic, death. I live 2,000 miles away and am struggling through overwhelm and confusion to manage the situation from afar - so many decisions to make, so much responsibility, a profound feeling of being alone, and terrified of making a mistake forever shackled to regret.
The sleeping dream: The walls are crumbling and water is pouring in, dripping, running, flowing. I awake from this short, powerful but vague dream with a start, gripped with the sensation that my mother’s apartment has flooded from within. Heart racing, mind whirling, I try to logically compartmentalize the sensations as unmoored grief and sadness. Water is the element of the unconscious, says Jung, it makes perfect sense that the space where my mother was is now filled with a flow of loss. It makes sense that my anxiety has given me this image of literal overwhelm, it’s just a metaphor. I put the dream aside and push on into a wrinkled half-clean set of clothes and attempt to meet as many of my immediate responsibilities as I can manage and head into the day.
Three days later: The phone rings with a Florida number, I pick it up, and it’s the manager of the apartment complex. My mother’s apartment is flooded. Literally. The central drainage pipe from the air conditioning units in the surrounding apartments has clogged, causing a backup — the AC unit in my mother’s apartment shut off, but the others kept running, causing a wet, hot, moldy situation to bloom throughout the walls, carpets, and everything within. The dream came true, I had an actual hot mess emergency 2,000 miles away which was consuming the physical remains of my mothers home. A living nightmare.
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The backstory, the truth: I’ve met a wonderful man and within a year we are slowly and cautiously considering joining as a family. With measure and ease, he begins living part-time with me and the kids in our new home while he works and commutes to a demanding job an hour away. I’m still in my long-term recovery from waves of compound loss (mother, father, divorce) and neither of us are skilled enough to navigate the typical challenges of partial co-parenting, housework habits and differences, and new levels of emotional care-taking. We love and adore each other deeply, we feel magnetic warmth between us, yet our communications frayed and tattered and disintegrated so deeply that one day, we called it off. We sobbed and clutched one another in the darkness, then he packed up his things and drove away. For good. The sound of the departing wheels on the driveway thrummed through every cell of my weary heart.
The dream in the night: A squirrel is climbing high in the branches of a large tree. The tree is the family tree, the branches are lineage, branches of connection, forking, spreading, fruiting. The squirrel is traveling along the lines, moving upward towards the top, when the branch cracks underneath him. It breaks and falls, one branch, then another, leaving a big gap in the tree and the sky filled with only air and emptiness. Falling, I wake up in a pool of flattened, resigned, sadness. That dream pretty much summed up the situation, the fractured sense of family, the big hole and loss, how interesting that dreams can pull together the threads of reality into poetic metaphors behind our closed, resting eyes.
That morning: The kids are still sleeping, I take my cup of coffee out to the porch to stare through my bereavement at the garden in the spring morning. In the driveway are two parking spots, one is my space with my car, the other was his space, filled with absence. I look over and in his empty parking space is a large broken branch. A large tree branch is now resting in his parking space. A branch heavy enough to have done damage to a car, it gave way in the stillness of the night and landed where he used to be. Just like my dream. I examine the tree above, the night was perfectly still and windless, I can’t believe what I’m seeing. But it’s real, a family symbol is in pieces, there’s nothing to do but drag it over the bank and give it to the hungry forces that will consume it, releasing it back the soft, spongy forest soil.
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The backstory, the shameful truth: The piles of mail cascade like scales on a snake, like crests on the rapids, like dunes across my long-neglected desk. I can’t deal. The envelopes are silent, they arrive, they gather. They may be shouting on the inside, but if I don’t open them, I’ll never need to know. I’m choosing not to hear it, just stay over there all sealed up and flat, growing by thin layers, slithering just out of earshot, the bite and venom of neglect won’t get me as long as I stay over here at a safe distance. A lifetime of perfect credit hangs in the space between me and the piles, and somehow, I catch most things just in time. 11th-hour jolts of action get nine out of ten bills paid, squeaking under the wire. But I missed one. Big time.
In a fit of muddled thinking, I attempted to simplify everything and I closed all credit accounts. I think I’m mitigating my risks. However, deep in the pile, there’s a $200 account fee seething, a message that I failed to open, failed to comprehend, and failed to pay, for a very long time. The envelopes piled so high that the big credit card company gave up, gave my bill away to get bundled up with other bad debts. They it sold off to an unnamed third party, and my single unpaid bill got swallowed up into a credit-damaging hellscape.
When I finally realize what has happened, it had been a while and the damage was pretty deep. I try to right the wrong and pay the bill, but I’m soon caught in a relentless circle of corporate disfunction and obfuscation — no one knows who holds this old debt, the amount is so small, the deals are so large. It’s been bundled and sold on a fast-moving marketplace, wheeled and dealed and stripped of everything except my social security number. No one can tell me who to pay to make it go away. I plead, I calmly explain, I rage, hot tears of stress and disbelief burn my cheeks. I yell and curse at innocent people in India who can only read from a script. I call lawyers, I call credit agencies, no one offers to help me, not even for a fee, and I go limp, spent from the efforts of trying to give someone, anyone, $200 to make the madness stop.
This unpaid bill is making a really awful mark on my credit report, red-zone bad, I am now clocking in near the lowest possible numbers. I’m now at the bottom of the barrel in this stratification of credit and worthiness. I’ve been marked as prey by the predatory lenders, and the letters that pile now are slickly laid traps for the desperate, the destitute, for those who have been starved of all options and will grab any offer that looks like a lifeline.
This is penance for my neglect. My perfect score is now in the basement, getting monthly dings that will keep it there until I hire the right team to unearth the new owner of this debt and undo the damage from my willful ignorance. I am resigned, but genuinely scared for what this means for my future - unexpected expenses, hard times, rejected car loans, mortgages denied, no credit to use as a cushion.
I try to make a fresh start by combing through my credit report every month and opening a new credit card — all I can get is a $300 limit with 27% interest and a hefty annual fee. I used to have a fat multi-digit limit because my credit score was so good, but now I swallow my shame and take it. For a year I pay off this bill every month and my credit score still stays in the red zone because every month that unpayable $200 bill shows up as a scarlet letter that marks me as unworthy.
The wonderful nighttime dream: A computer screen shows my credit score on a graph, skipping along the bottom. I’m haunted by this failure, my regret is heavy, the line is dragging me through the depths of remorse. Then the screen changes color and becomes animated. A blinking, smiling star emoji appears and is now following a sharply rising line. Like a hockey stick, my credit score is now peaking to the highest level at the top of the screen. Ding Ding Ding, it’s the big moment on the Price is Right, I’ve won the prize, rejoice!
That morning: It’s such a nice, hopeful dream, but I wake rueful and resigned. I think about how it’s time to set aside another three-hour chunk, to saddle up for the frustration, make the calls, and go to battle in the depths of bundled bad debt. I sit at the kitchen counter with my coffee and check my email on the phone and see this Subject Line: New Information About Your Credit Card.
Oh great, I think, they’re letting me know my score has dropped again, just like it does every month. I open it and instead the full email says this: Good News! We’ve increased your credit limit to $1,000! My worthiness had increased by a multiple of three. Just like the star emoji promised. Another dream has come true, and this time it’s good.
I was charged with excitement, something positive had finally happened, the rock I’d been pounding against had rolled uphill just an inch and it felt like a mile. Empowered by the progress, I dove deep into the folds of shadowy ownership and contact information and found a human on the line who could help. First, she confirmed that this was indeed a problem and that I wasn’t the only one who had been unable to pay my bill. And then she promised to make amends, and she did.
Within three months of the dream, the whole matter is resolved, four years of red-zone history is absolved, my credit is restored. The needle is jammed so far into the green zone that they called me “Exceptional.” Everything is blinking stars and cries of victory, sitting astride a ride straight to the top, Ding Ding Ding, just like the dream.
