The Red Wolf and My Grandfather's Message

[draziwrok]

I'm going to start with a little bit of backstory, but if you want to skip ahead to the actual dream you can do that too. I didn't know my grandfather. I know that he died from cancer of the lungs. I know that my mother and my grandmother loved him more than anything. I asked about him a few times, and I got a few stories, but I really only knew him through the look my mother got when she thought about him. I was too young to remember him. My grandmother lives with us now, so she's not alone in Maryland while we live down here in Florida. I've never told her about this dream, I am not sure I could handle the look she might give me. Grief? Hope? Disbelief? Or wanting badly to believe? I started lucid dreaming because I was tired of the same dream that would happen over and over. A typical student's nightmare: Sitting in class without your homework done. It's been a long journey, and most of the time I can escape those dreams now. I wrote down my dreams almost religiously, as I've been diagnosed with mental illness and there were a lot of times where I needed some sort of hope, and sometimes the dreams gave me that. I want to believe that there might be something more, because it means I'm not as alone as my depression tells me. At the same time I know that it might all just be my brain chemicals, but some strange dreams have happened that make me consider that maybe we're missing something big about how our dreams work. Perhaps we really are connected. "Your relatives are watching out for you." My mother used to say. "Guardian angels." I didn't really believe, but this dream makes me reconsider. The Red Wolf and my Grandfather's Message. It starts as it usually does, in the house I grew up in. I use it as a kind of jumping point, I usually recognize I'm dreaming whenever I see the old house and I go walk through the dream. I let the dream lead the way, as sometimes I've stumbled into some great stories that I write down the next day. Sometimes they make absolutely no sense, but other times they give me ideas for short stories (that I'll never write, I'm one of those cliche 'writers' that say they want to write books but never do.) I end up in a beautiful room. The walls are glass, kind of mirrors. There are two silent people in there with me. I think they were women? Not sure. But they said nothing as I walked through the room and opened a door. I enter an apartment-like area. There are pictures on the walls. I look at them, of course they swim and change, but I recognize these. I looked in these photos and I got the feeling I was looking at my grandmother. My mother, too. Pictures of the whole family together - Grandfather included. I turned from the pictures and I saw him - I don't remember his features, I just know the feeling. The feeling of almost bursting into tears and waking myself up, because I knew I was looking at my grandfather. We talked briefly, I don't remember what about. But I really wanted to tell him how his wife was doing. I told him grandmother watched documentaries daily, did her puzzles and knitting, and had a loving dachshund who snuggled with her every chance he got. She was happy, with her daughter's family. I really wanted him to know this. I really hope the message got through. If you've tried talking to people in the dream, you kind of understand the difficulty. Most of what he said was a feeling, a kind of knowing, instead of understanding his words directly. He told me he didn't have much time, as this trapped him in the Dream briefly to tell me what he wanted me to know. His message came out nonsense, almost like a phrase that's gone through Google translate too many times to make any direct sense. I ask him if all dead are trapped in the Dream, and he doesn't know. I have a feeling that maybe not, maybe they can come and go, maybe they can briefly hang on long enough to pass a message through the fuzzy barrier and hope that their receiver can translate it into something coherent. I don't know for sure, who can know for sure if it's real or just chemical? You have to accept that you may never know for certain. That it might be something more, or something not. But it doesn't matter, really, it just matters what you believe. He tells me that the message will help me, that I'm trapped and it might help me get free, and it might help me gain strength in the dream. I see a Red Wolf in his place sometimes, It's strange. It swaps back and forth. Then when I'm talking to him I see something behind him. It terrifies me. "What is that?" I say. "A spigot." What? A Spigot? But that's what he calls the thing. They seem to appear, angry that I'm speaking with my grandfather. They gain in numbers as I try to translate the message. "The life force given unto the Nile." Says the red wolf. "Stump. Sleigh." Nonsense. "Give your soul to the river. Trapped in the dream. Presence of the dying." At the end of the message it blurred into vague feelings, and the dream was taken from me by the "Spigots". I woke with a feeling of confusion, but I understood the message. The message he had gone through so much apparent trouble to give me? I finally understood. HE wasn't trapped. I was. By my depression and by a medication that wasn't working. I was fighting so strongly against the current, tiring myself out. He gave me the answer so vaguely, but it's meaning came to me as "Go with the flow." Don't fight the course of the river. Just float with it. Trust that around the bend might be some happiness. As for giving strength in the dream, since then I've remembered his words whenever the dream became chaotic or nightmarish. I relax, and find my center, and float with the river of the dream. I don't fight it as hard as I used to, instead I follow it wherever it wants to go. Sometimes the nightmares get worse the more we try to fight and struggle. Going with the flow seemed to work more often. I told my mother about the dream. She was kind of guarded, I knew talking about Grandfather made her very sad. But she seemed to feel a bit better afterwards. Perhaps she is comforted by the thought that maybe she was right? Maybe my relatives ARE looking out for me. I'm still floating down the river. There are still rapids and rocks, but I haven't thought about suicide in a very long time. Somewhere around the bend is happiness. I just have to go with the flow.