Today I was leafing through old documents and came across a memorandum of a dream that occurred on 22 January 2014, as follows:
Last night (22 January 2014) I had another psychic dream. I
dreamt of somebody winning a large amount of money. This morning, I woke to
hear on the radio news of a betting coup that took the bookmakers for several
million, Paddy Power alone losing one million.
This recalls a dream I had some years ago of a flood in
Cabra, to wake to the radio news of an actual flood in Cabra.
My children, Niamh and Tomas, had experiences of vague dreams
about tsunamis in advance of actual tsunamis.
Of course there is more to a dream than the coincidence with
outside events. These coincidences are probably only a device used by the
subconscious mind to alert us to the importance of the dream itself – in
relation to some aspect of our own life. The challenge this morning is to
decipher the personal message of last night’s dream.
When I dreamt of a flood in Cabra, the message concerned the
break-up of my family. In the dream, the flood, which was more extensive than
in real life, prevented the family leaving the Phoenix Park, where we had been
having a good time together. Having prevented our exit by the Cabra gate, the
flood then invaded the Phoenix Park and caused the separation of the family, as
my wife fled the flood with two of the children, while I led the other two to
high ground, where we were isolated. Afterwards, when the flood receded, and I
re-united with my wife, two of the children were missing. The flood was a
metaphor for life. This metaphor often occurs in people’s dreams, and gives
rise to the phrase “River of Life.” The message was that the River of Life was
about to bring about the break-up of the family, which soon afterwards happened
in the shape of Niamh going off to Australia and Ronan going to live as a
scholar in Trinity College.
So, on to the details of last night’s dream:
It begins with the family travelling in a double-decker bus.
Diarmaid is driving the bus. Instead of the driver sitting in front of the bus
and downstairs, Diarmaid was sitting at the back, upstairs. This had obvious
disadvantages, but it had the advantage that he could see how the bus occupied
the road as he travelled along. The journey was hazardous. I was afraid that
the rest of us, dispersed around the bus in front of him, were occluding his
view, but he kept assuring me that he could see fine. He did not use the
breaks. Perhaps they were not working. The bus kept trundling along and had to
swerve this way and that to avoid obstacles. It took up approximately half the
road, so when he had to veer out to pass a parked car, he had to veer back in
again snappily to avoid oncoming traffic.
Then we came to the gate of the Phoenix Park, a gate kind of
like the North Circular Road Gate in real life. We had to turn right, across
the oncoming traffic, to enter the park, and there was some doubt in my mind as
to whether the gate was wide enough for the bus. It proved just about wide
enough, and the traffic leaving the park held back sufficiently for us to pass
through the gate and swing to the right to follow a road around the periphery,
heading up towards Cabra and then Castleknock.
Is there any significance that this psychic dream returns to
the same venue as the other dream of twenty years ago? I don’t know. What are
the characteristics of the Phoenix Park in my family life? It is a place where
we often enjoyed family outings when the children were young.
Eventually, after many alarms connected with Diarmaid’s
driving, he eventually parked by the roadside, and we all tumbled out of the
bus. The day was bright and airy and we hopped and skipped along the road. Then
Niamh came out with her prediction of a lottery win.
A stanza of Nostradamus, she announced, had just revealed to
her the winning numbers of today’s lottery, the Euro Millions.
“O no,” I said, “you can’t ever correctly interpret
Nostradamus in advance of the event he prophesises. Take what happened back in
1998 or 1999. A French expert on Nostradamus had predicted that a Russian
Satellite would fall on Paris on a particular day. As a result of this,
hundreds of people left Paris for the weekend, but the disaster never happened.
Actually what Nostradamus predicted,” I explained, “was that ‘the King of
Terror would appear in the sky’ on that date. In fact, the ‘King of Terror’
turned out to be nothing else except an eclipse of the moon. Nostradamus’
verses have two forward-looking senses,” I said, “one is to predict stellar
events by reference to his great knowledge of astronomy, and the other was to
prophesise things that would happen to coincide with these events. The ‘King of
Terror’ appearing in the sky was not a prophesy but a prediction of a date on
which an eclipse of the moon would happen. By making this accurate prediction,
Nostradamus hoped to arrest some readers to the probability that the
accompanying prophesy would also come true. In this case the prophesy was that
a new despot would be born in Russia on that date. My guess is that he meant ‘political
birth’ rather than actual birth, and that the object of his prophecy is
Vladimir Putin.”
What a lecture I was
giving!
“When political leaders hold power too long, they become
infected with a notion that they have some kind of divine right to rule. But
segments of the population become disaffected as they cling to power. Putin has
now held on too long. Russia will soon go the same way as Syria. The trouble is
already beginning in the Ukraine. When demonstrations break out in Russia, Putin
will suppress the riots violently and spark even wider uprisings until the
whole country is in chaos.”
I had introduced Nostradamus to the family one Halloween,
when the kids were getting too big for going around the houses doing trick or
treat, and I looked for something spooky to excite imaginations as we cracked
nuts.
My lecture was cut short when we all became aware that
Diarmaid was missing. Nostradamus was put on the back-boiler. We anxiously
retraced out steps towards where the bus was parked, but there was no bus
there!
We had a fairly extensive engagement with a group of gardaí,
even in a garda station or van, but they had no knowledge of Diarmaid’s bus or
his erratic driving. We had an encounter with road-workers who were laying tar
on the road, somewhere around where the bus had been parked, but they had not
seen Diarmaid either. Then a fellow with a bike said to me, “Why don’t you ask
Nellie O’Dee?” Now, I didn’t know any Nellie O’Dee. “Who?” I said. “Nancy
O’Donnell,” he said: “we just call her Nellie O’Dee.” No wiser, I followed the
direction his finger pointed and saw some people camping on the other side of
the road. They could be set-dancers, or, alternatively, people involved in
drugs, or maybe just campers. I went looking for Nancy O’Donnell, and was
pointed to a girl who said she had called Diarmaid over to give him a present
(which she had held for him since Christmas). She said Diarmaid had told her he
had better not leave the bus where it was, but take it to a bus-park, and
assumed that that was where he was gone.
Now Niamh announced that she had just nipped into a shop and
bought a Euro-Millions lottery ticket and had won the millions. She showed me
the Nostradamus stanza, and, by the hokey, there was the prediction, clear as
day. The date of the win was absolutely clear. The verse went on to refer
clearly to two politicians of our era. When you took their names and coded them
into numbers, you got two numbers. Multiply these two numbers together and you
get a large number. Breaking this large number into two-digit numbers gave you
today’s lottery winners.
The Diarmaid adventure being forgotten, a happy atmosphere
once again prevailed.
The mystery of how the subconscious mind knows about current
events, (flood in Cabra, gambling coup, tsunamis), remains, but is trivial as
regards my personal emotional life. That the flood, of my dreams, being the
River of Life, brings change to my life is clear. But what emotional event is
indicated by our bus adventure and Niamh’s imaginary lottery win? Why the bus
and why the Phoenix Park?
I imagine that each of the participating children represent
some aspect of my own personality. I had a dream once of my wife being swept
away by a torrent, and a new life emerging. That turned out to be me finalising
my decision to take early retirement from my civil service job, (a constant in
my life for 40 years, like a wife), to embark on a new career as consultant.
What aspects of my life or personality do each of my
children stand for in my dream world? Diarmaid is the artist, creative and
unpredictable. Ronan is the mathematician and stability personified. Tomás is
the actor and performer. Niamh is the teacher, adventurer and psychologist.
Surely Niamh is not the person with the mathematical focus
to extract dates from obscure verse, translate names into numbers and perform
strange mathematical processes! She must represent the teaching or preaching
area of my psyche. So the dream seems to predict some new direction in the
preaching or teaching area of my life!
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