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BLUE COLLAR DREAMS

by Ed Bonapartian

Being an active dreambringer, I am always on the lookout for situations where I can bring dream awareness into environments where dream sharing is not a common practice. As the manager of a steel warehouse I was recently afforded the chance to share some dream work with the owner of a crane repair business who normally would not have the time or the inclination to explore his dreams.

Our conversations took a new twist when he told me of a recent visit to the chiropractor. We began to discuss alternative medicine and knowing of my interest in holistic healing he asked me if I was involved in anything along those lines. I replied that I was actively engaged in working with my dreams and described the insight and healing they have brought me over the years. My comment clearly hit a nerve with him. For the first time in our acquaintance, he told me a dream.

 “You want to hear a strange dream?” he began. “Not too long after my mother died, I have this dream where she is standing in front of me, just as real as I am standing in front of you now. I can’t believe what I’m seeing because I know she has passed on. I ask her, Ma, what are you doing here? She tells me she just wants to check on me and make sure everything is all right. I woke up right after she said that. It was all so real I was sure Ma had actually visited me. I started thinking maybe she was still alive, that I had just dreamed her death. I got out of bed and drove down the road to my mother’s old house to see if she was still living there. This is in the middle of the night, mind you.”

He was shaking his head, still having trouble believing what had happened. He needed help in understanding and validating his dream experience.

“Been there, done that,” I told him.

I shared a very similar experience of my own. The night after my own mother’s funeral, she appeared in one of my dreams in order to say goodbye. I was certain this was both a dream and a real visitation. As I recounted my dream, my friend seemed both surprised and relieved. There was a shared feeling of just how real these dreams had been. In our line of work you would get some strange looks if you mentioned to your co-workers you had talked with departed relatives in your sleep. But between the two of us, we could confirm that this is really possible and can be a great blessing. I ended our conversation by recommending some of Robert’s books to my friend to give him the tools to explore his dream further.

A few weeks later I crossed paths with him again at work. With a smile on his face he shared another experience. “ Hey Ed, you want to hear something funny? I was at the diner having breakfast the other morning when I run into a friend of mine who owns an excavating company. He looked a little preoccupied so I ask him what’s wrong. He tells me he had a strange experience the other night. He goes to sleep one night and starts dreaming about his former business partner who died recently. Says the guy starts talking to him in his dream. My friend can’t believe it because he knows he attended this guy’s funeral. He even had to tell him he was dead, in the dream the guy was talking like he was still alive.”

“Ed, you wanna know what I told him?  Been there, done that..”

Ed Bonapartian is an Albany NY dreambringer who delights in sharing dream awareness with those around him both in the workplace and at home. In the telling of this story, it is his wish to share a sense of those dreams and the gifts they can bring into our lives.

[12/18/01]