Special Dream Stories

In his autobiography, Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama shares a dream he had about his deceased father (page 129) that was among the important experiences of his life. While a student at Columbia University, a year after his father died, he had a dream that gave him closure with a man who had abandoned him at the age of two.

The Special Dream: I am riding on a bus with many other people, men and women with different journeys to make. An old man sitting next to me is reading a book that says, “Our treatment of the old tests our souls.” I woke up to find everyone gone. The bus came to a halt, and I got off and sat down on the curb. Next I am in a cold cell meeting with my father.

Inside a building made of rough stone, a lawyer spoke to a judge. The judge suggested that my father had spent enough time to release him, but the lawyer objected vigorously. My father was before me, with only a cloth wrapped around his waist. He looked pale, his black eyes luminous against an ashen face. I walked up to him and we embraced. I began to weep.

My father spoke to me and said, “Barack, I always wanted to tell you how much I loved you.” He seemed small in my arms now, the size of a boy. Then it was time for me to go. When I whispered to him that we might leave together, he shook his head and told me it would be best if I left.

I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him and for me, his jailor, his judge, his son.

On Saturday afternoon, my best friend, Stephenie from high school called me from Nashville and told me her brother was dying of lung cancer.

He had been fighting cancer cells for the past five months and was now at death’s door.  She had been with him day and night for the past week, caring to his needs.  He was dying at home and what once was a beautiful healthy 53 year old man, was now down to 75 lbs.

Because we were best friends since high school, and he was a few years younger than us, I felt like Kevin was my  little brother too and I loved him.  Everybody liked Kevin, he was such a good guy, never got into trouble, never caused any problems, always worked hard and was  good looking too.  He looked like Steve McQueen, he was that handsome.

Now Stephenie asked me to help her find a priest, to give him the last rites.  I live in Virginia a state away, but understanding the urgency of her request, I immediately found the number of a priest friend I had known from my days at Father Ryan High School, and so I called Father Kiby, who was at a Catholic church on the East side of town.  A hellish storm was raining down on the city and there would be no way he could make it out to Franklin, Tennessee in time.  Plus I never talked to Fr Kiby but could only leave him a message on the church answering machine.  Who knows when he would get it?

Next I immediately called St. Matthew’s parish, in Franklin and to my surprise got a human voice on the other end of the phone.  It  was a real live priest, not an answering machine.  I explained to him what was going on and he said that he would try,  but the weather was so bad, the storm so violent, that right now  he couldn’t even make it over to the church if he wanted to.  I gave him the address of Kevin’s house and hung up with a pray that he would make it in time.

As it turns out this storm brewing in Nashville was the worst storm in 500 years, wrecking havoc, causing 31 deaths and millions of dollars in damage and flooding.

Somehow, someway that priest made it through the peak of the storm to reach Kevin within the hour and gave him the last sacrament for Catholics,  the “Anointing of the Sick” or Last Rites,  along with the Apostalic Blessing.

Many people, including Catholics do not know what the Apostalic Blessing is, but it is a very special blessing and it’s as if the pope himself came into Kevin’s room and anointed him.  I don’t know how this priest came through this storm to minister to Kevin, but by some miracle he did.  I will always be deeply grateful to him for ministering to Kevin.

What often happens when dying people receive the Last Rites, or “Anointing of the Sick” as it is now called, they surprise everyone and rally.

My 85 year old mother was in a coma for a week, dying when I called a priest to give her the last rites.  Instead of planning her funeral the next week, she rallied, and woke up and asking for something to eat from Wendy’s.  She was specific too, a hamburger, milkshake and fries.  She lived another 7 weeks.

Kevin rallied too and lived another week, fighting to stay alive, to be with his family, his sons and the people he loved.  The end mercifully came to him on May 7th and it was a bitter relief.  The funeral has now come and gone, he is buried in peace, a life that passed us by too quickly. For me Kevin has gone ahead of us, he is now in heaven, with God his Creator.

Native Americans believe that when someone dies they come back to a member of their family or friends, to let the whole family know they are okay.  I believe this too and in my reach I have found that 80% of the time this happens shortly after the death or funeral.  No word yet if anyone has had a special dream, but I’m guessing it can happen at anytime now.

I’ll keep you posted.

In 1994, my husband Michael died suddenly when he was 43 years old, following gallbladder surgery. He knew he needed his gallbladder out, but like most men he didn’t want to see a doctor, go to the hospital or interrupt his busy work schedule for surgery, until it became an emergency and he had no choice.

Mike was a pretty tough guy and could tolerate high amounts of pain or discomfort. He was also someone who hardly ever took medicine, even a Tylenol because he was always very healthy. The surgery itself was a success, but during the process he received too much anesthesia. The result was Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS).

In the first 48 hours after the surgery, we frantically looked for anything to reverse the damage to his lungs, but there was nothing we could do. Eventually, the doctors put him back into a drug-induced coma where he lingered for several days until his heart gave out. It is a very sad story about the demise of a wonderful man. To repeat the story, even now, is hard but I have reached a point where I can share it now without crying.

Shortly after the funeral I was at home sleeping in my bed when I suddenly saw Mike standing on the left side of the bed. The encounter did not feel like a dream or anything I had ever experienced before. He looked right at me and was beaming with happiness. I knew he wanted to tell me something, something important, but I was angry at him for dying. So, with my mind, I told him to just go away, and he immediately did.

I didn’t spend much time reflecting on this strange dream, because I was too busy dealing with a high level of stress due to his sudden death. My two sons were only ten and eight at the time and were in shock.

My family and my in-laws were all grieving too, and one sister-in-law was taking his death especially hard. It seemed like nothing or no one could console her. A couple days after I had my dream about Mike, this sister-in-law called me from her home in Michigan and said she just had a dream about Mike and he appeared to her and talked to her in the dream. She told me he said everything would be okay and that he didn’t want to leave us, but not to worry about him.

I was amazed not so much at her story, but at the sound of her voice! She sounded fine, even happy and excited.

Over the next ten years I searched through dream books to identify this type of experience, but discovered there wasn’t anything written on it. This type of dream didn’t even have a name. All the dream books I found covered the “meaning of dreams,” the “interpretation of dreams,” how to have “lucid dreams,” or how to “remember your dreams.” There was nothing about this particular type of dream experience.

Then I moved my search into psychology books and spiritual books, including the Bible. I also searched the internet to find anything I could that would help me figure out what this dream experience was, yet I could not find a single concrete answer.

In 2006, 12 years after Mike’s death, the idea of writing a book explaining this dream experience came to me. I didn’t care if anyone thought I was crazy, because I knew what I had seen; this dream experience is one that you never forget. That fall I bounced my book idea off a few friends, and to my surprise they liked it. So I began to map out my research and placed small ads in community papers across the nation, searching for anyone who had this type of dream experience. During the next 15 months, I collected over 119 dream stories. The book, Special Dream, was born.

What has fascinated me most about the work is seeing the final collection of everyone’s dream stories together as a group, and how the total collection clearly shows patterns or repetition of certain elements. For instance, several people described how they too saw the person standing at the left side of their bed, just like I had seen Mike in my dream. Another common theme the book brings out is the simple word “okay,” which is the most repeated word to the dreamers.

Intrigued by this fact, I looked up in the dictionary meaning of the word “okay” and it includes being safe and good. So while we may still have many questions about life-after-death and we do not know where our loved ones go after they die, it seems from the dream experiences listed in this book that our loved ones or friends are in a place that is both safe and good – and that is very comforting to know.

My mind is confused about my mother being gone, even though it’s been a couple years since she died.  I feel like my mind can’t fathom the fact that she is not only gone, but “gone forever”.  I try to understand what that forever part means, and logically I get it and I talk to my brother Michael about it, but for some reason I just can’t put my intellectual reasoning around it yet.  This concept of “forever” is too big for me conceive.

Little things remind me of her, like pansies.  She loved pansies and would always have them as the first flowers of spring in two little pots on her front porch.  So when I see pansies I automatically think of her.  There are so many little things I could tell you about her, which I didn’t realize I knew until she was gone, because they are tiny and insignificant by life’s standards.

Why are these tiny memories being magnified now?  I have no idea, probably this is just a lifetime habit, of knowing her and being close to her.  She always kept track of us, calling or writing, she was never far away and with that connection gone, this emptiness is probably a part of the bereavement process.  This understanding of being, “gone forever” is especially hard because she was “always there” and I miss her.  I wonder where she is, I wonder what she is doing, and I wonder what it is like to be in heaven?

Right now I feel so indebted to her for everything she so unselfishly gave to me as her child.  All the things I learned I learned from watching her and she taught me about love.  She made me who I am by just being my mother and my life with her was precious.  In many ways she was the perfect mother, but with that said, she also wasn’t always easy to understand, from my perspective anyway as her daughter. But now as a mother myself with my own adult children, I see how wise she was and how she knew me better than I ever realized.

Losing my father had a big impact on me, but it seems small compared to the loss of my mother.

I am sorting these feelings out, day by day, but they surprise me since my mother has been gone for a good while.  There is a quiet void inside me for not having the pleasure of getting her anything this Mother’s Day.   I’m not sad, like I was at her funeral, but I find myself marveling at who I am, and where I have come from.  It is a feeling of great responsibility since I had her as my mother and from her I was given much love.

I just got back from Florida, where I was working in Ft. Walton Beach all week.  This was my first time there and it is a beautiful town.   I shared with a couple of people the stories in my book while I was there.

One was a ex Navy Seal who had written a book himself, and he told me that he knew what I was talking about because he and other members of his family have had them.

This discussion we had really interested me because I feel I can write a whole book on the special dream of military folks, and hope to do so in the near future.

Also I felt compelled to share with some bikers I had briefly met in the hotel bar, on the first night.  I was eating a late dinner at the bar and they were in there too.

Don’t know if they are going to buy the book, but I had a strong gut feeling to just throw my story out there and they were really nice to me.  Funny but you never know what other people need to hear, but I guess they needed to hear this story.

Bereavement is so hard, and I am happy to reach out and help others if I can.

Washington, DC – okay so you’ve written a new book and it’s really good.  Good enough to be published by a publisher in New York and is selling around the world.  The critics like it and you’re winning awards, receiving accolades from readers who think it’s great.  You landed a top notch book cover design and you’re doing book signings in Alaska, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. Your book trailer is on You Tube, and the web site is a hit.  Everything is in place, everything except for one, that call from the O.

Here is the million dollar question, what does it take to get the call from Oprah?  There are marketing firms who happily boast they can reach her and get your book on Oprah, but for a fee, starting at $10,000.  One tip they provided is the importance of packaging. Make sure it is pretty, attractive and be persistent, don’t give up.  Remember the big picture, after all, what is a $10,000 investment, when considering the bigger picture. There are books and CDs specifically written to help get you on Oprah.  Expensive books, with coaching lessons, that say watch her show, find her interests and you’ll navigate quickly through the maze to land your book on her desk, but they add at the end, in small print, there is no guarantee. 

It’s hard to hear friends say, “Oprah would like this, you should go on Oprah”, like she’s a neighbor or friend.  It’s true we feel a close connection to Oprah, especially since she has been in our homes, for twenty-five years.  Only this close connection includes a big family and there are millions of us who feel the same way.  Imagine her staff processing through tens of thousands of requests every day, hunting for the right product to shine on the show.  For someone in Oprah land to actually pick up my little book, out of the mountain of daily requests, would be a miracle and the chances of this happening would probably be one-in-a-million or the same as winning power ball. 

Last year on the Ellen Degeneres Show, Ellen was trying to call Oprah to say she wanted to be on the cover of “O magazine”.  Good idea, but after several hilarious attempts, it was impossible for Ellen to get through the first wall of security.  It was funny watching Ellen try to talk her way around the layers of security in an attempt to reach Oprah herself.  She was unsuccessful, until a staffer in Oprah’s camp saw the segment and then flagged Oprah to call Ellen the next week.  Do you think Ellen would reach Oprah for me?

Right now it would probably be easier to crash a White House party and meet President Obama than it would be to meet with Oprah.  If I could meet Obama I would ask him to give me Oprah’s cell number, since he probably has it.  After all they are friends and both are from Chicago, or I would ask him if he could call her for me, so I could talk to her for five minutes about my book.  I’m sure if she knew about my book she would love it and if the President of The United States called her I know she would take his call.

Over the recent months I have tried to connect with Oprah through her various enterprises.  Including the Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah & Friends radio show, Oprah’s O magazine, Oprah’s book club, Oprah’s web site and I even tried to reach her best friend Gayle King, who works with her.  So far it’s been optimistic effort, but no response.  Maybe Tyler Perry could help me out, since he seems nice and I’m pretty sure he is friends with her.  I read he once gave her a White Bentley.

Now time is running out and the clock is ticking down, after Oprah announced her departure next year in 2011.  Giving up isn’t an option even with the odds against me.  Until her last show I will always keep the hope alive of being on her show, seeing her in person and talking to her for a few minutes about my little book and how it will help others.  If this doesn’t happen, I’m okay because deep down inside I know that life good, my book will keep selling, even if Oprah doesn’t call.

if you have lost a friend or loved one recently, know that you are not alone in your grief.  It is a long and hard process but there are many people happy to help you along the way.  Including me, I have been there and know how it feels. 

But this blog isn’t about death at all, it is about love, and how love never dies. 

Even though someone you love dies, it doesn’t mean you stop loving them.  This was also proven to be true according to the dream stories people sent to me after the death of their friend or loved one. 

If you have a story you would like to share, please send it to me.  I will also share with you the Special Dream stories I have gotten for my book.

L