A Dream Vividly Remembered

I set up this blog to talk about dreams half-remembered. I have great dreams that sometimes take me away to fantastical places with memorable faces. When I awake, I feel as I’ve been somewhere else on vacation.


Several dreams pop into my head as I wrote the abovementioned paragraph, all richly rendered in brilliant colors and sensations. I’ve awakened to songs in my head, promises to myself to return and consternation that my life isn’t like that now. I joke that I’m glimpsing an alternate universe. Some dreams really make me question reality.

Last night I had a very powerful dream, it wasn’t colored in rich vibrant hues; it was actually hued in greys and browns as if viewed at twilight. I woke up in the middle of the night with my mind reeling trying to memorize as much as I could.

I’m in a low ceiling room, but it’s not a basement because there are full windows. But now that I think about it, very much like a Japanese house, low ceilings and a staircase in the middle of the floor plan. It’s not extremely dark, which usually isn’t a good sign and there are several people in the room. I would call the lighting murky.

I am passing by the staircase when I see two women coming down, a younger woman, 40s blonde, short hair, holding the hand of an older woman guiding her down the stairs. The older woman is brought directly to me.

The older woman is in an old fashioned floral patterned dress, she seems very glad to meet me. She is 5’8”-5’9”, on the thin side, faint reddish hair. Now, here’s the odd part. In the dream I instinctively know that her father died when she was 3yrs old and her mother, Alma, raised her alone.

She hugs me fiercely and we fall to sitting on a step on the staircase. We rock as we hug because she thinks I’m her granddaughter and she is very sorry to have had to leave me too soon. I assure her that things happen for a reason and it’s all right. She is relieved and I lead her back up the stairs, we reach the first landing where I stop and she continues upward.

The staircase is very obvious, as I wake up I’m stunned by the level of detail in my dream. Oddly, I never got her name; she was just “Grandma”. I didn’t call my grandmothers grandma, I called them Lola as befitting my Filipino heritage.

I only post this because maybe somewhere, someone is missing their grandma and it’s why she ‘came down’ and she detoured into my dream. This is the first dream where I remember the smells, intimate and close as if the person was truly in my arms.

Whoever she is, I think she’s now in peace and hopefully her granddaughter knows it.