DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

After 15 years of infertility the dreamer and his wife finally rejoiced in the birth of their "miracle child" daughter. In the same year he won a competitive national academic fellowship and moved to California, where, at age 40, he had the following dream:

When I was forty years old I was in California on sabbatical and I dreamed that I was showing people around a beautiful house that I lived in there. I said I would want to live here forever if it were not so far away from friends who are seekers on a spiritual path. Later in the dream there appeared a man who had devised an elaborate system of wooden levers which catapulted against a wall, thus collapsing the entire house. I came running to see it, as the house collapsed and then burned, while people were still assuring one another that it could never disintegrate: the house was as solidly designed as a nuclear power plant, they said.

In the next dream sequence, I found myself on a space ship. We learned that a member of the crew had been mysteriously killed. He had been cut in half, symmetrically bisected, with each half of the body intact. No one could figure out how such a thing could happen and we were all apprehensive about it occurring again. Suddenly I saw my wife taking care of our one-year old daughter in a nearby room and the door started to open. I cried out to warn her, but the door shut again.

At this point in the dream, I "woke up" and realized that it had all been a dream. Actually, I had "woken up" into another dream, but did not realize it. The phone started ringing. When I answered it, it was someone from my office. But I cut short the conversation because a call was coming in on another line. It was my friend Gretchen, who was working as a psychotherapist in a hospital in California. She told me that the mysterious bisection process was actually taking place in the hospital where she worked, in the same town where I was living in California. At that point, I turned to my wife and asked her directly, "Is what's happening right now a dream?" She said, no, you're awake, it's not a dream. But I knew it wasn't true, so I forced myself to wake up for real at that point.