My Grandmother, Hazel Aslin Sweeney, on our second to last visit, December 1996.
My Grandma was one of the people I feel benefited from my dreams. I'll let you decide.

DREAM MESSAGES FOR GRANDMA
Driving the straight flat stretch of highway connecting east and west, Ohio to Nebraska, my mind was on autopilot when it came to my yearly Christmas visits to family in Omaha. I had made the twelve hour trek every year for at least twenty years since I moved to Cincinnati in 1976.

The holiday had ended and thoughts of my return journey east were sidetracked by a detour to some ninety miles north in Sioux City, Iowa.

Grandma had moved to the unremarkable nursing home in Iowa five years earlier when Grandpa was still alive. A year had passed since I last saw her drawn weary face surrounded by her weekly coifed salt and pepper hair. She questioned her purpose for living. At ninety-one her heart was lonely without Grandpa and medication for pain didn’t seem to alleviate the constant aches that pulsed from within every cell of her being.

Concerns from the previous year were pressed across my brain running ticker tape connecting words shared by Grandma. “The doctor said that it was genetic and that your mother is depressed because I had once been. I speak to her on the phone weekly. It’s not her fault you know, she can’t help how she feels. I understand. I just wish that there was something I could do for her.”

After the death of a six year old granddaughter, my dad’s heart attack and some other life altering changes, my mom, Grandma’s oldest daughter, fell into a deep depression that hospitalized her twice and took years to overcome. Only communicating weekly on the phone, she had not physically visited Grandma since the death of her father four years earlier.

It was troubling for me as I left, wanting so much to comfort Grandma and eradicate the words of the doctor that seemed to be chiseled in her brain . It was the spontaneous pull before I left for Cincinnati the following year that seemed to be the gift, the unaware answer to my prayer.

Grandma was excited as I entered the room. I hadn’t given her notice. She spent most of her time in bed so it didn’t seem necessary. It was difficult to see my once active hard working Grandma confined like this as it had only been ten years before when one could find her out riding her bicycle throughout the small town in South Dakota where she had lived for sixty some years. But she had lived a good long life so I reminded myself as to the purpose of my visit.

I thanked her for the great French genes as she didn’t look a day over seventy-five. She shared stories of herself as a young independent woman way ahead of her time, wearing pants when it was considered inappropriate, having a checking account without her husband, and being married, secretly, as a schoolteacher. Stories of her past filled our time together, stories I had never heard and was happy to now know, seeing the personality similarities passed down onto my mother and me.

Eventually I began to share the many feelings and ideas that had been coming to me since our last visit. And the dreams. I couldn’t forget the dreams. I had been carrying them for months.

There had been two. Grandpa was with her on the other side. They were together again, happy and no longer in physical pain, Grandpa and her hand in hand sitting upon her cherished white sofa, wrapped in clear plastic. I assured her that it was safe to remove the plastic and enjoy it without concern regarding the dirty fingers of grandchildren who were still on this side.

Explaining how I had seen her there, already on the other side, my message was simple. She was the one holding her spirit back. I thought her attachment to the doctor’s words as if from God himself, were keeping her from moving on. As I shared my opinions about guilt being a by product of man and surely not of a benevolent God, her sentiment of responsibility for my mom’s depression were keeping her stuck in the physical. Imagine being held hostage to the chamber of guilt that these words evoked.

Having gone through a depression myself in my early forties, I understood the pangs of heartache that had touched my mother and grandmother at different stages of their lives. What different life scenarios had triggered our individual feelings of sadness and melancholy? To cut and paste and place people into categories with such labels had done nothing to help as far as I was concerned but to keep people in yet another box.

The smile on Grandma’s face was a gift placed in my heart that day. It’s as if a ball and chain had been removed, the words of another, finally released. I not only saw the psychological straight jacket unfold itself from around her but I felt it too as her spirit was able to resonate with the words I was sharing. Kissing her goodbye, I asked her to visit me in my dreams when she made it to the other side! Her giggles assured me that her heart had been set free.

Before leaving Omaha the following day, I told mom that Grandma was ready to die. She was ready to leave us physically. My mom was upset with the frankness of my words but I reminded her of the productive life that Grandma had lived and that this wasn’t living anymore for her, in constant pain in a lonely nursing home. I asked mom to go and give Grandma the peace that she needed, to leave her knowing that mom would be okay.

She did. My mother surprised my father two days later asking him to drive her for the last time to visit and say goodbye to her loving mother.

A month passed and I wasn’t surprised when the call came telling me that Grandma had made it to the other side. I felt joyful for her as I knew she was liberated. Within days she came to visit as I slept, sitting beside Grandpa, following me in an old Model T.

Sometimes my dreams lead me to a friend as it did the other morning. By sharing, I was given confirmation as to my dream being "dead on."

This morning one of my dreams presented me with a visual and a laugh as my 80 year old father was working hard on his property only wearing a speedo! I was surprised as he looked pretty buff, but my sister and I only spoke in silence with rolling eyes and mouths shut declaring "whatever!"

Dreams are never set in stone, no matter what any well minded person may tell you. For the 18 years I recorded my dreams and was literally guided through cancer, too many joined in with the voice of THEY, (you know,"THEY say...") trying to assure me that a dream was usually "Just a dream" or it meant only this or that.

I'm big on pushing that you find your own way; your own connection to your dreams just as you connect to your own self in your waking hours. Try to let go and see what transpires without any rules or regulations. See where your heart leads you, and go. Go to that place where you sleep.

My mind was filled with dreams this morning moving in and out of one another like opaque bubbles floating in a night sky. They were present but not tied down like daytime seems to be. They were there for me to see but not solid in the ways of what's considered reality. More like a ghost would appear, they are ready to disappear just as quickly.

I was able to get two down in my journal when I realized that I could not remember the others. Closing my eyes, I went back into a place of silence. My focus was on keeping my mind empty. I knew that if I tried to think about the dreams, they would never reappear. It was best not to try, no different than in my waking hours when I forget something. It seems to only reappear when I've let it go.

It wasn't long before a dream resurfaced. While I was recording it, two more floated into view. I imagined a lasso around the two, holding them until I was finished writing down the present one. After journaling, I had five dreams that were in my sites.

I've sometimes remembered as many as eight dreams before in one night. I find that amazing since there was a time when they didn't seem to even exist for me. I wonder what tonight will hold?

Sweet dreams.