Old friends passing through...

Recently a deceased friend visited me in my sleep.

Isn’t it funny how these things can happen in a dream and not feel at all out of place? She was right there with me talking to me as if it was perfectly normal for the dead and the living to converse in a normal manner. I do not find it strange to be visited like this anymore, the memory of deceased friends has come to me many times before and I accept the visits graciously. But what do they mean?

A lot of people will say the dream state is nothing more than the ticking away of our subconscious, stray thoughts with no meaning… at most a symptom of anxieties or unfinished thoughts. Yolngu I work with have a very different opinion of dreams and will often become very interested to hear about dreams or visions. Somewhere in the middle is me. I’m not confused by the events and don’t have any sense of foreboding about being visited but know better than to pass it off as nothing. Something inevitably happens to connect my dream to what is going on in the material world. 

Lately my kids have been fascinated with Ghosts, zombies and skeletons. They are working through the information available to them to create their own understanding of the lore of the un-dead. We discuss it regularly and they have determined that Zombies must be killed, my boy has a stick designates for this purpose, Ghosts aren’t necessarily bad, are like shadows and cannot be killed and if a skeleton ever gets up and walks around it will be treated like a zombie! My son was at first scared of ghosts, he wanted to kill them like zombies but is now content to talk to them without fear. Although not un-dead Aliens (from outer space) are also on his hit list…  We’ll need to discuss the possibility of not all Aliens being  bad guys.

Zombie killer... (Even so called zombies have a story to tell. I wouldn't class Frankenstein's monster as a Zombie)

 

I am not sure why my friend would come to me now or what will come next but there will be something.  My friend died last year, hit by a car as she crossed the road. I still don’t know the exact details of the incident and was never satisfied with the answers given. I tried to find out more but at the time I didn’t want to do anything that would cause distress to her family. 

Every weekday on my way to work I ride past the place where she was hit. I often wonder how it happened. Was she careless on the road (it was suggested she rode against the flow of the traffic, but where is the evidence?) or did the driver simply not see her? At the time it was announced that the driver wouldn’t be charged and there was a lot of speculative comment in the media about the cyclist being negligent but no facts to back-up these opinions.  People got all self-righteous about helmet laws and bicycles on the road etc… but we never heard what actually happened.

Maybe I need to find out… Maybe I will.

The day after my dream I received an email which mentioned the friend from my dream, a request for help for her family…  I cannot help them in the manner that was requested and I don’t necessarily need to interpret my dream to mean that I should but the message was another one of those coincidences that reminds me something is waiting to be done.

My Yolngu friends get a bit nervous when the spirits of the dead are not dispatched. Nobody sleeps easy until everything is cleansed with smoke. The dead must complete their journey… They cannot be left wandering their old haunts, tormented and confused.

It might seem odd or even disrespectful to be talking about the life of a friend who has passed away in the same conversation as kids imaginings about 'monsters' but seeing the peculiar goings on of the world through the eyes of a child can help put things into perspective. The kids are playing with ideas and concepts of things. The world of the spirit and the material blend, fantasy is not necessarily fiction it's more like a philosophical sand pit, until they discover for themselves what is true or untrue every idea, every story or crazy idea could be true. They understand most physical boundaries but to them so many things are still possible. I like that.