Margaret, a professional woman in her sixties, was becomingincreasingly aware of mortality as she received health warnings for herself, and heard about them for her friends. Some anxiety about death must have been on her mind when she had this dream. It is still very clear in her memory.
Dream report: Rocky Pass
I’m standing on a sort of tramping track in hilly country with my adult family. We’ve been climbing steadily, and now we face a kind of translucent veil or membrane barring the way. It’s some kind of transition. My family say, “We don’t want you to go,” but I’m saying that I need to go on. I walk through it, leaving them, and walk alone on a narrow path between huge grey-brown rocks, bare except for a few shrubby plants clinging to them. It’s like a pass through the mountains, but I don’t know the place. I’m not carrying a pack or any equipment.
I come round a bend and to my surprise I see a whole crowd of people waiting, adults and children, all laughing and talking and calling me to come. There are no old folk, and I don’t recognise anyone, but they seem to know me. There is a blue sky and a pleasant green landscape behind them. I feel as if a welcome awaits me, if I were to go on.
At that point I woke up, feeling very relaxed and peaceful. I lay there for a while, feeling sure that it was about death, relieved that there was nothing to dread. Then I felt astounded that I’d had such a comforting dream about death.
Sometimes I think about death, and when I recall the experience of this dream, it calms me down. I only had to walk a little way on my own, from one loving group to another.
This was a vivid experience for Margaret, but it has the metaphoric style of a dream rather than the hyper-real quality of the near-death experiences reported by people who have come to the edge of physical death.
Mountains are the archetypal home of the gods, a spiritual landscape, and it seems in this scene that there is a well-worn path to follow from one side to the other. The “translucent membrane” between life and death is reminiscent of the membrane around a baby at birth, or perhaps the “veil of the temple” hiding the sacred space from ordinary view.
So she does not expect to find herself in a scene like this when the time comes for her to “pass over,” but she feels deeply reassured by her own inner spirit, that the transition is not to be feared.