I dreamed I was struggling to explain something important in my faulty French. I woke, checked online, and read a message (in French) from a friend in France. He reported that he had been trying to help a man who was struggling to understand what he describes as "an absurd experience for a Cartesian spirit like mine."
The "absurd
experience" was a dream in which the skeptic met his departed father. His
father was eating breakfast, wearing a beautiful blue shirt. In ordinary life,
the man did not believe such an encounter was possible. Waking, the Cartesian did
not believe that an encounter with the dead was possible, In the dream, he
rushed to his father, gave him a big hug, and was deeply moved.
Trying to make sense of what happened, the dreamer exclaimed,
" On devrait nous apprendre, quelque part, à
apprivoiser nos rêves. We need to be taught
how to make friends with our dreams."
Apprivoiser is a very interesting word. It is often
translated as "to tame" or "make gentle". Its most famous
use is in the beloved story of the Little Prince, who learns from the fox that
in order to learn the secret of life he must "tame" the fox in the
sense of making friends with something wild.
My friend thought that I might be able to help the man who had
dreamed of his dead father. I could hardly refuse this appeal to help after
seeing the word apprivoiser. I wrote a book called The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. It explains why contact with the
deceased is neither weird nor even unusual, since they are alive somewhere
else. They call on us and we visit them, especially in dreams. We discover that
healing and forgiveness are always available, across the apparent barrier of
death.
When foreign rights to The Dreamer's Book of the Dead were sold, my French publishers came up with this title for the translation: Apprivoiser la mort par le rêve.
I wrote to the Cartesian who had the "absurd"
experience of a loving encounter with his father on the Other Side:
"I have seen it so many times: a man encounters his
deceased father in a dream. He discovers that to die in this world is to live
in another world. This transforms his understanding of what it means to dream,
to live and to die."
I wrote this in my faulty French, My dream had rehearsed me for this minutes before.
Telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance? Maybe all three. The categories we use for "supernormal" phenomena may blur. What is clear is that in dreams our perception reaches beyond our ordinary senses. We send and receive messages. We make visits and receive visitations. We are prepared for challnenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We have easy access to the departed. And any dream is likely to tell us something we do not already know, in the waking mind.
- Journal report from January 6, 2016
Drawing by Robert Moss
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