Complex Presentiment: Half-Figure in a Yellow Shirt by Kazimir Malevich, 1928-1932

It’s the only dream I’ve had where I actually die in it. Normally, if I’m being chased by something or I’m falling, I wake up before it’s over, or I find a way out.

But this dream ended with the realization I had died, and I was left to sit with that knowledge. It bothered me so much, I questioned if I should leave the apartment to go to work in the morning.

The dream is in color: I’m walking through a countryside of corn fields, late fall. I realize I’m with two twin girls – they’re dolls, but they’re walking alongside me.

We come upon a pond, and next, I’m in the water looking back at them from the surface. One says to me, Your Fear Will Drag You Down.

I feel the water, the chill of fear, the sensation I’m sinking, the feeling I’m drowning. The weight of the words, and my submission to them, weighs me down.

I reach for the throat of the doll, to squeeze it, but her head separates from her shoulders and puffs up like a balloon. I drown.

I’m a believer in the magic of dreams, that sometimes we receive insights through metaphor, possibly precognition. My wife believes she was visited by her dad’s spirit shortly after he died; my mom dreamt her dog would go missing from the other side of the Atlantic. He did.

You can believe whatever you want to believe. For me, the dream foretold a kind of slow soul death I would experience many years later, by giving up on my real dream, to write.

But now that I’m doing it again, my reflection is starting to change and I see there’s a real person starting to reform, there.

Categories: death, writing

Tags: blogging, Doll, DPchallenge, Dream, Dream Journals, Dream Sharing, inspiration, Interpretation, Memoir, postaday, Psychology, Social Sciences, writing