Lime Frost
Dreamed January 1957 by Anonymous #53
Born in England, I came to the United States in 1956 with my husband and three children. The following January we were about to move to another house, and I was too busy to take much notice of this disturbing dream which occurred at about 5:00 A.M. one Friday morning.
I suddenly felt that I was standing in the living room of my parents' home in England where they were still living. It was very dank and warm because they had not gone to bed too long before (I thought) and the fire was banked in the covered fireplace. It was very quiet.That day and the next I forgot the dream in my preparations to move. On the Sunday following the Friday dream I received a telegram from England. It said that my father had been taken ill suddenly on Saturday and was in the hospital. I spent the rest of that week in a daze but still, for some reason, did not expect it when the following Sunday I received another telegram to say that he had passed away--just one week later.I suddenly felt afraid for my family--for all of them. Then it seemed that the cold light of dawn was coming and I was standing at the window and looking out into the back garden. Then I knew that it was only my father that I had to worry about. I looked and dimly saw his body lying out there on the grass and I knew that he was dead. The ground all around seemed sprinkled with white and I thought it was frost.
Sometime after this, when my mother came out to live with us, I discussed the dream with her, and she told me that my father had been spreading lime all over our garden just prior to becoming ill (hence the appearance of frost in the dream?)
EDITOR'S NOTE
Her dream wasn't literal. She sees him dead in the garden, when he died in hospital, days later--but the dream compresses his weeklong dying into a single image. Not literal--just right. She gets the message that matters to her.
Note how she jumps to the conclusion the white powder is frost--reasonable in January, but it turns out the truth is less likely. Such errors are common in ESP accounts--unlikely details that the conscious, biased toward familiarity, misinterprets. When recording dreams, it pays to be naïve.
--Chris Wayan
SOURCE: Working With Dreams by Montague Ullman and Nan Zimmerman, 1979, pages 301-2.
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