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THE DREAM:
I am attending a memorial for two young men who have died. They were both in my class at school and I've been asked to speak about them at the memorial. I am with a friend, a powerful medicine worker, and she also is going to speak.
We walk across a football field and get in line behind other students to wait our turn to speak. However, I suddenly find myself separated from the group and on the other side of the gym where the memorial service is taking place. I become concerned that I am going to miss my turn to speak so I begin to run back toward the football field. As I run, I see people walking out of the gym and I ask where they are going. One woman says that the memorial service is over. I yell "No" and run into the gym where the body of one of the young men was kept and it is gone. Another person confirms that the service is indeed over.
At this point, I begin to sob and thru tears, I tell the 4-5 people who are standing around that I won't be able to say what I wanted to say. This realization is deeply disturbing to me. Then I ask if I can say to them what I wanted to say to everyone. I begin to speak about the young men in my old class. I'm aware, as I'm doing this, that there is nothing I can think of to say about the other young man.
I start by being very honest about my classmate. I tell the people how he was, like most teenage boys, rather obssessed with sex. I tell them how selfish he seemed and how he was aggressive toward the girls on the school bus. Then I start talking about ther ways this person changed, after a terrible accident that almost killed him. He became somewhat of a spiritual guru after a near-fatal accident. He practiced yoga and was very spiritually aware. I didn't know this from personal experience but heard it from different people in the community. My last sentence was, "I didn't know that person. I wish I had."
After I finished, I noticed that there were now about 25 or 30 people gathered. Most of them were from the community. Several people were weeping. One woman in front was deeply touched and I felt she had some karmic relationship with my classmate. I noticed another woman from the community on the front row. She stood up and her eyes were sparkling with appreciation. I went toward her to hug her but she put out her hand and stopped me, then she put both her hands together and bowed toward me in an obvious honoring way.
MY TAKE ON THE DREAM SO FAR:
I see this dream as the surfacing of strong issues that have been signaled by all the dreams I've been having lately about water. Family challenges are also part of the water dreams but this dream, in particular, deals with two other issues.
Just as in the dream, the two young men in the dream are actually known to me. One of them is dead and the other one, I am assuming, is still alive somewhere. It is the classmate who is still alive that I spoke about in the dream. Just as in the dream, this young man was always trying to get a hand up under any girl's shirt or skirt he could. He was popular, aggressive, and totally obssessed with girls. And just as in the dream, he was almost killed in real life and, at some point after recovering from that, he did undergo some sort of spiritual awakening.
When I first started considering what the dream could be telling me, I wondered if I needed to find him. I wondered if I needed to have some kind of closure around our past together. I'm still not sure about that but I think what's more important is that he was reflecting to me a very deep truth about my belief system around men in general. When I said, "I didn't know that person. I wish I had.", I don't think I was just talking about one man. The reality is that I don't think I've ever known "that person" at all, in any of the men that I've cared about or loved. Realizing that, just as these words are being typed, makes me sad.
Beyond the personal message to me about how I really feel about men, I believe a larger spiritual message was also present. Since the dissolution of my spiritual marriage about 3 years ago, I've basically stopped working as a spiritual teacher, healer, and counselor. When I became deeply disturbed by the fact that I could not deliver my "message", I believe the dream was warning me that I cannot continue to hide away and hold back my gifts from the world without serious emotional and spiritual repercussions. When I did manage to get the message out, albeit only to the small group that remained, I was honored for that effort by the community, as represented by the woman who forced me to notice her honoring bow but interrupting my natural tendency to give more, by hugging her. She is a real woman, here in the community where I grew up and where I now live again.
Also, the fact that my Medicine Worker friend is in the dream with me speaks of a higher spiritual message. She was a big clue that I was being asked to step up to the plate, so to speak, by her appearning in the dream and doing exactly the same thing. She made her speech, as far as I know, but I almost missed mine when I became seperated from her (from the spiritual aspects of my work).
I've pondered what it meant that I could find nothing to say about the other young man who had died and for whom the memorial was also being held. In real life, he was abrasive and crude and I did not like him. I felt he treated people in a degrading manner. His life ended abruptly so he did not have the chance to experience a spiritual awakening like the other classmate. I feel there is perhaps an even stronger spiritual message in that small detail - my inability to find anything to say about him. However, I'm not getting to that right now so that's left to unfold in my consciousness as time goes by.
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