The darkest dream I ever had

A few times in my life very strange things have happened. Things that made me wonder if unconsciously my brain had told me the future in dreams.

I have only ever dreamt that two people I loved have died. First was my Grandad. My Grandad was apparently healthy. He was my big cuddly Grandad who was fit and active. One day I dreamt that I threw a ball at him and he keeled over and died when it hit his chest. The doctors (in my dream) said he had had a heart attack. A year later my Grandad died. He had undiagnosed cancer and by the times he died it was through his whole body. He died very very suddenly. In the morning Mum called to say that he had flu, in the afternoon he was dead.

Some other strange things happened when Grandad died. The heavy doors of the theatre blew open and all the doctors noticed how strange it was. My Grandad hated hospitals. My family think he was getting out of there. Then that night my Mum lay awake in bed with me asleep beside her. She felt a hand heavy on her leg. She said that instantly she felt calmer. She knew it was her dad telling her that it was Ok.

A year later for an art project during my Foundation art project I asked my Mum to pose as a dead person for a collage I was putting together. She is the only person I have ever pictured as dead for a piece of art. A few months later, now studying advertising in Cornwall, I dreamt that she died. In the dream I grabbed her dead body and screamed and screamed for the entire dream. It was truly the most terrible dream I had ever had. A few months later she had a brain hemorrhage and died within a week.

They are the only people who have ever died in my dreams. And then they both actually died shortly afterwards. Both were apparently healthy.

And another strange thing is that my cat Maisie has only ever regularly sat with her paw resting on two people. My mum and my Grandad.

A few weeks after my Mum died I had one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had. It was so vivid it was filmatic. The lighting was bluish - a bit like the lighting of Sweeney Todd. I was married and I was mortally frightened of my husband. He was a butcher and murdered people for meat. I had had an argument with a woman in town and I told my husband knowing that he would kill her. I watched as he butchered her flesh and pulled out her heart. I felt so so so guilty. It was my fault she was dead. My husband gave me the heart and told me to get rid of it. I went out onto the street and walked up a cobbled street. Suddenly I saw a huge black cloud whirling towards me. I hid from it because I knew it was evil. When it was gone I walked down to the cliff above the beach. There was a (strangely) huge paper drying rack onto which the town's rubbish was being thrown. I threw the heart onto the rubbish rack below and it became lost among the muck. Then I woke up.

I don't really know what the dream meant. But I had a rather extraordinary driving instructor at the time who had told me he could interpret dreams. he told me that the dream was about my guilt. I was subconsciously guilty, he said, of murdering the relationship between my Mum and myself. I thought it was rubbish until I thought carefully about my feelings of guilt regarding my Mum. In the months before she died we had rowed badly. I'd also been a little ungrateful about my birthday present. Maybe that's actually what the dream meant in part. But I also think that the person who was having their heart cut out was me. It was my own heart that I threw onto the rubbish. Perhaps.