When You Dream The Same Dream As Somebody Else

Karen and Linda (not their real names) were sisters. They grew up in a two parent home with two other siblings, a sister and a brother. Karen was considered the black sheep of the family, and when she became an adult, she moved away from her family. Though she kept in touch with her sisters and brother, the times they spent together were few and far between.

I met Karen when she was in her mid-twenties. She told me that nobody in her family understood her or cared enough about her to build a relationship with her. At one point, she shared with me an ongoing nightmare that she had experienced from the time she was a child. The nightmare was the same, again and again, year after year.

In the dream, she saw every member of her family murdered. Blood was everywhere. The scene was shocking and frightening, because the murderer was Karen.

That dream haunted me for years. But what occurred several years later impacted me so much more, I couldn't help but think that reincarnation might have played a significant role in this family's life.

Though their relationship was strained, Linda called Karen one day to ask if she might stay with Karen and her husband and children, because she was pregnant and didn't want her parents to know that she was going to give up her baby for adoption. Karen agreed to have Linda stay with her family until after the baby was born. She hoped it might bring them closer.

Linda, probably feeling alone in this new city, found herself attracted to Karen's husband and betrayed her sister by sleeping with her brother-in-law. When Karen discovered the betrayal, Karen kicked Linda out of her home. Because Linda knew nobody in the area other than me, I allowed her to move in with me and my family until she found a job.


One day we discussed her relationship with her sister.

"I don't know what it is about her," she explained. "For some reason I'm afraid of her."

"Have you told her you're afraid of her?" I asked.

"No," she said. "But every night I have this recurring nightmare that she has murdered me and the rest of my family."

As the chills ran down my spine, I asked her if she had ever discussed the dream with Karen. She hadn't. Neither sister knew that they had been sharing the same nightmare their entire lives.

Years have passed since that time. I still wonder what underlying thoughts color our perceptions of the world around us. I have so many questions I would have loved to have asked Karen's family. Did they ALL share this same nightmare?

Sadly, Karen died several years ago, and the mystery remains. Could Karen have killed her family in a prior life? How did both sisters have the same dream?

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RECURRING DREAMS

My sister, Cindy, said something very poetic that I would like to relate, "If dreams are the pathway to the soul, then recurring dreams might be the speedway to the psyche."

She could be right, because while dreams tell us something about ourselves, recurring dreams are probably screaming out to us for attention. I myself have had them numerous times and, because of their repetitiveness, I have eventually been able to figure out their significance.

Because of my experience with recurring dreams, I think they probably continue until the dreamer figures out why they continue to have the same dream.

Here is an example of a recurring dream related to me recently:

"The dream always begins the same way – I am a little girl, crawling and reaching to find my way out from beneath a tall hardwood chair that has, in addition to its four legs, multiple criss-crossing beams beneath the seat of the chair. I don’t recall having ever being concerned that I might never escape, nor am I particularly afraid of my unusual circumstances, but I am definitely frustratingly challenged by the ordeal. As I endlessly navigate through the chair legs and beams, I feel convinced that there is a right path to take, if I could only identify it. But each time I poke my head through one of the beams, I find another one obstructing my progress.

The dream always ends with me still under the chair, sitting quietly contemplating my next move, and looking forward to waking up.  The dream always begins with a recognition of the familiar surroundings and a determination to begin plotting my course once again."

The dreamer relates that the irony of this dream is her lack of concern or fear. "After all, I was trapped under that chair. However, I was never desperate to escape, nor afraid that I would never escape. In fact, the more often I had the dream, the more familiar the predictable dilemma became. It was, at times, almost a welcomed dream. For someone who has spent her entire adult life fearing something or someone or some future unknown, it suggests that, at one time – many years ago, perhaps I was more self-assured about my circumstances, environment and life."

Her introspection is interesting and what happens next was very revealing to the dreamer. She goes on to say that, "Three decades after not having experienced the dream, I was dusting a chair in our bedroom that once belonged to my Great Auntie Alice and Great Auntie Margaret. I had inherited the desk and chair set from my mother after her aunts had passed away. I have been in possession of it for over 30 years. I’m always finding something new about the desk and chair – a chip here, a mar there, or sometimes it’s something that had been tucked inside one of the drawers and forgotten for years.

However, on this particular day, something struck me about the rich cherry-wood of the chair, its tall back with thin slats of wood, and the cross-beams beneath the seat.  It dawned on me that this was the chair in my dream. How was it that I hadn’t recognized it earlier?"

My belief is that dreams reveal something about the dreamer. Dreams that bring the dreamer back to an earlier time reveal something about the childhood of the dreamer. Perhaps this dreamer needed to reclaim that part of her childhood that she had been neglecting.