Angels, Dreams, and Déjà vu

Do you remember your dreams? Have you ever experienced a prophetic dream, received messages from other people, or had angels communicate something to you? Dreams are usually either abstract or unremarkable, but sometimes they can be scary and full of disturbing images or actions. Such a dream can cause us to wake up experiencing residual fear or panic. Imagine how you might react if one night your dreams foretold of someone’s death. Fearful? Panicked? Thankfully, this type of dream is more the exception than the rule.

As a child, I woke up one morning and thought about my dream before I got out of bed. In the dream, I was lying in bed, much like what I was doing while I was recalling the dream. I could hear that it was raining pretty hard outside. I got up and looked at the clock. It was 7:15am. I went downstairs, looked out the window, and saw that my mother was emptying one of the containers that she had placed under the eaves to catch rainwater. The dream didn’t strike me as being particularly incredible because the actions were so mundane; however, what happened next has made this dream unforgettable.

When I got out of bed, I looked at the clock. It was 7:15am, just like in the dream. It was also raining pretty hard. I thought, “Now there’s a coincidence.” I went downstairs and looked out the window, just as I had done in my dream. To my surprise, there was my mother, emptying a container that had filled up with rainwater.

Was that a prophetic dream or was it just some sort of weird déjà vu? Maybe my subconscious was tuned in to what was going on in the waking world around me while I was still asleep. Could I have just heard all of that and then assumed it was a dream? If so, how can I explain the time on the clock? Since then, I've never had another dream where something like that happened.
 
I have had deceased relatives visit me in my dreams, mostly my parents and my mother’s parents. That's a relatively common dream theme among many people (pardon the pun), and there's a lot of information available about how to interpret their presence. I think we dream about family members, whether they've passed on or are still with us, simply because they're such an integral part of our lives.

While the content of those dreams has been fairly random, there is a pattern to their involvement. For example, my mother typically interacts with me in much the same way as she did when she was alive: stubborn, argumentative, controlling, distrustful, and suspicious. My father, however, never utters a word in my dreams. He’s just there, like wallpaper. My maternal grandmother usually appears in a similar fashion. My mother’s father, one the other hand, usually plays an active role in my dreams, but he never actually says anything at all.

I love the dream world and look forward to my nightly adventures in that other realm. Most of the time, my dreams aren’t very noteworthy. Like most people, I’ll have some dreams on occasion that defy explanation and are so weird that I have to wonder what inspired them. One night several years ago; however, there was no mistaking that my dream contained what I later determined was a message of death.

In this particular dream, I was standing inside an old vacant building with stone walls and exposed pipes. I was in a large empty room on the third floor, looking out a window onto the street below. There was an angel standing just outside the window on the fire escape. She didn’t say a word to me. Instead, she pointed to more angels packing the streets below. In fact, there were so many angels, it reminded me of those old Verizon commercials, where the people with the cell phones had the entire network following them around. I had never dreamed of angels before, so one angel would have been enough. This felt like overkill.

There were three different wing color combinations that coordinated with their gowns: green and white wings, red and white wings, and yellow and white wings. This seemed odd to me because I had always envisioned angel wings to be white. The one on the fire escape seemed to be in charge of the others; her wings were a translucent white.
    
After I acknowledged the angels on the street, the lead angel turned to them and, instead of speaking words, sang a beautiful note. It may have been a word, but it just sounded like a musical tone, almost operatic. As soon as she started singing, all of the other angels joined in and I was surrounded by a symphony of angels. Again, no words, just several harmonious tones sung at the same time. The volume was massive.
    
A few days later, my sister forwarded an email to me from one of our mother’s cousins in Germany. They told her that her mother (my great aunt, the person my mother went to visit each year) had died that Friday night. That was the night when I had the dream about the angels.
    
When I realized this was probably more than just a coincidence, I looked up angels in my dream dictionary, which stated that to dream about a choir of angels means, “Your strength of character will find the light of truth.” I didn’t understand how that could be connected to my dream, but just as I was about to close the book, the words the peacefulness of death caught my eye. I looked at it again and read more. It said, “When a healthy person dreams of an angel, an ill person will find the peacefulness of death.” My great aunt had been suffering from Alzheimer’s.
   
Needless to say, this dream kind of freaked me out a little bit.

What was your most memorable dream?

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Image credit: Mary Baxter St Clair - The Secret Gardens
Used with permission via creative commons