Friday night, I had a tornado dream. Tornadoes are a fairly common theme in my dreams, and they most often show up when I’m under a lot of stress, have too many irons in the fire, or have a lot of general chaos going on. Things are winding down right now — school year just about done, no job interviews looming, nothing really weighing on my mind — so the dream was a little out of place. Anyway, here are the specifics of the dream, and then I’ll lay out what happened Saturday morning.
I was outside in a backyard somewhere, and I kind of feel like I was with my dad. The yard rose up in a low embankment similar to the yard of the house I grew up in, but there were quite a few trees.
While we were outside, I looked up in between the trees and saw kind of a funny looking cloud. I pointed to it and asked if that was a tornado. No sooner had I asked than it became obvious that yes, it was.
We ran inside and started scrambling for a safe place to ride it out, but there was no basement and nowhere in this house that was really sheltered. There were so many windows and no interior rooms, and the ceilings were really low. What really had me upset, though, was that I couldn’t find my kids. I knew I needed to get them to safety, but I didn’t know where they were.
Now, usually when I have these dreams, the tornado just passes over, and everything is okay. This time, the tornado directly hit. I wasn’t hurt, and neither was the person I was with, and my kids seemed to be accounted for at that point, but the house we’d sheltered in was pretty much destroyed, and we had to start cleaning up.
Again, this tornado dream was different than usual, and I just had a bad feeling when I woke up. My kids were planning on going to yard sales, a flea market, and a birthday party with friends, and I. Did. Not. Want. Them. To. Go. No logical reason why not; I just didn’t want them to go.
They went.
Not an hour later, the phone rang. It was my younger son. They’d been in an accident. My older son had been driving, and he (usually the calm one) was shouting, “Oh my ******* ***, we got in an accident!” Both immediately assured me that everyone was okay.
Unlike my son, I do not handle anything calmly. I immediately started bawling, yelling at them that I knew they shouldn’t have gone, and running to find my husband who had of course disappeared somewhere outside. When I finally did find him, I basically threw the phone at him and took off to get my kids.
I won’t detail the accident scene, but my son had rear-ended another car and totalled both vehicles, so he ended up getting a citation (officer was lenient since my son admitted fault and didn’t try to shift blame), and he’s now without a vehicle a week before having to start two summer jobs.
So what about the dream? As I was reliving the phone call and everything that happened after, I realized that the dream, as well as my trepidation the next morning, may have been a bit of a premonition. Seeing the danger approaching, not knowing where my kids were (when they called, they gave me a route number for the road but couldn’t freaking tell me WHERE they were), the destruction and damage that had to be dealt with, and most importantly, the fact that ultimately there were no injuries.
But it does give me pause. I used to have dreams that came true, either in part or in whole, but it hasn’t happened for a long, long time. Is that unwelcome ability coming back again in some form, or was that dream come true just a fluke?
I don’t know, but I’ve got a feeling that I should pay more close attention to my dreams, as well as my intuition, from now on.
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