My Father's Suicide: On symbolic dreams

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Dreams are funny things, aren't they? They can come in all forms -- small, medium and large. They can be extremely vague or precisely vivid. Or they can be random or full of meaning. I never used to put much stock in those full-of-meaning sorts of dreams -- well, that is until my father died. Since then, I've had several telling dreams that seem to cut through all those surface emotions that try to cloud everything during the day.

Just a few days ago, in fact, I had one of those dreams. In my dream, I was meeting with a new therapist, and I was telling everything that's happened in the last 10 years. After I told the exhaustive story, I showed my therapist a photo of my father. She took one look at it and gasped.

"This is the father of another one of my patients," she said. "He died two years ago." As it turned out, my father had another family (FYI, he didn't really have another family somewhere...) and faked his own death in 2003. He went to live with them until he died two years ago.

I woke up utterly shocked at just how vivid the dream actually was. It played out like a movie -- all those details, the dialogue, how perfectly and accurately it captured my life. I remember being so mad in the dream because my father's other family got to spend so much more time with him. A whole eight years of memories that I never had the chance to make. It just wasn't fair. I felt cheated. I found myself thinking about the dream a lot over the last week. What did it mean? Did it even mean anything? Maybe I was reading too much into it; after all, we all know I have a tendency to over-analyze things. Maybe it was just one of those random dreams.

I'd love your expert opinions, friends. What do you think the dream meant? Do you have a lot of symbolic dreams? Do you over-analyze your dreams? xoxo

[Photos via We Heart It]