When Two People Have The Same Dream: Concluding Post

 image courtesy of bsmny.org

This week we’re exploring the nature of life, especially when life acts unpredictably. Mendelssohn and his sister, Fanny, wrote the same piece of music independently of each other. My grandchildren, when they were growing up, occasionally experienced identical dreams on the same night. And I have given the hypothetical example of a prophetic vision that was followed by the incident taking place in “real life.”

Every one of these incidents has a “Wow!” factor. Each one represents life acting in ways that are not common. At least that is our perception. We think life should progress in a logical sequence. There should be a predictable series of beginnings, middles and ends. Each case should start with a “cause” that is followed by a foreseeable “effect.” The fact is, all of that is nothing more than a side effect of what life is really offering us. Life is perfectly willing to follow in that pattern as long as the pattern doesn’t get in the way of life’s primary purpose. But its primary purpose is to teach us and to make us aware of a constant communication that is transpiring between ourselves and something so vast that it is almost inconceivable to us. And that vast thing—call it Spirit, God, the universe, our guardian angels, our higher selves, whatever—is benevolent. It wants to assist us.

When this vast thing—let’s call it the primal force--has an important message to deliver to us, one of its favorite techniques is to break the “rules.” To repeat: those rules are ones that we have arbitrarily imposed upon it and have little to do with what is really going on. But the primal force loves that! Because then it can act in unexpected, startling—even shocking—ways, and by doing so, it can really grab our attention.

One of the best ways to grab attention is through repetition. And if you can repeat in a way that is also startling, so much the better. Without having Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn in front of us, there is no we can say, “Tell me about your music composition.” But we can observe from a distance and see that, not only did this waking dream repeat itself, but it happened at a time of grief and added stress as their beloved father lay dying. Their waking dream about music was communicating an important message—possibly something about a “repeated, sad refrain” (to put it in modern jargon).

We’ll never know. But it was the primal force sending a communication to both Felix and Fanny that was describing a sense of conflict that they were living through. I suspect that it also offered an insight into how best to manage those difficult times; that’s the nature of the dream message.

But whether the dream imagery comes to us in the “traditional” sleep state or it does something that seems completely bizarre to us—like manifesting as a double image in our awakened lives—it wants to help us, it wants to guide us, it wants to offer us insight into how most effectively to live our lives. And it does so uninterruptedly, through every single moment of our time on earth.