What was crazy was on Saturday; I had a dream where I moved back to Ann Arbor. My mom and brother came to help me with the move and we went to Meijers (a crazy ass superstore) to buy apartment stuff. My place was in walking distance from the store so I went home early to get things set up. My mom showed up a little bit later. I asked her, “Where’s Michael?” She said she left him at the store to teach him a lesson because he got fixated on CDs and wouldn’t leave when she told him to. I guess I lived close by enough that she figured he would know how to walk there. An hour later, he hadn’t shown up. I was worried so I called him on his cell a few times but he didn’t answer, so we went back to the store to see if he was still there. No one had seen him. I went through the whole store looking for him, starting to panic because I had a gnawing fear that someone with bad intentions had lured him away (he has a tendency to talk to strangers and is really naive). We drove around looking for him, and as night fell, we finally called the cops. With every hour, I was getting more and more scared, because I know that with each passing hour that someone is missing, the chances are exponentially slimmer that they will be found, or more accurately, that they will be found alive. Two days later, it started dawning on me that someone must have taken my brother, and that at this moment, he was probably already dead. I was absolutely devastated.
This dream freaked me out. It was really bugging me the next morning, so as I was heading to pick up Whitney for brunch, I called my mom to tell her about my dream and to tell her to keep an eye on my brother and have a talk with him about strangers. I sometimes call people up and let them know about my dreams if I notice when I’m hitting a period where things from my dreams are showing up right after in waking life, and I have a dream about something big; I figure that it doesn’t hurt to tell people to keep their eyes open. So I call her and I say, “I’m just calling because I had a really bad dream last night where Michael disappeared and I knew he was killed by a stranger.” She says, “Seriously??? I was just worrying about that when you called because I had a nightmare last night where he was kidnapped.”
And then this morning, I had a short dream in between hitting the snooze button where I ran into this random acquaintance at a Starbucks whom I haven’t seen or talked to in over 6 months; I never run into him. In the dream, he gave me news about a project that was disappointing. I went to Starbucks after work, and as I was parking, I remember thinking, “Danny’s in there.” But I figured it was one of the many irrational bursts of thought that flash through my mind in any given moment. I walk into the store and the first person I see is Danny. I ask him about the same project from my dream, and he tells me exactly what he told me in my dream. It was pretty uncanny.
The good thing about these periods, is that it’s kind of interesting to see what matches up. The bad thing is that I get anxious, because I worry about if the bad nightmarish things might show up too. Luckily, it’s usually just the random details (like an item I notice in a room in the dream) or small scenes that happen.
I really don’t think true time is linear.