This isn't about a dream that came true, exactly, it's more of an odd (but very specific) dream symbol that turned up in real life.
Recently, I'd been struggling with some mental blocks and heard that a way to break through them was stream-of-consciousness writing. The idea was to encourage ideas to flow from the unconscious to the conscious mind, so every night before sleeping I'd write pages of whatever nonsense popped into my head. One night after doing this, I had a vivid dream, the kind that seems to hint at something deeper and haunts you for ages afterward.
In the town where I grew up, there is a long, twisty road that goes out to the country. In my dream, I came back to this town after many years. Near the start of this twisty road, I saw a tree with overhanging branches. This tree had a history, and (in the way one does in dreams) I had always known of it. People would secretly come there to leave symbolic objects, which would gradually be overgrown by the tree's bark.The objects people left there represented some element of their private pain and suffering. The significance was not always obvious, only the person who'd left the object might understand what it meant. Over generations, the tree had grown over and absorbed all sorts of things - jewelry, bits of cloth, keys, links of chain, etc., all signifying suffering of some type. I understood that some of my loved ones had left things there long ago too. I felt sad for them and was acutely aware of the passage of time. I also felt like there should be something I could
do about it, but couldn't understand enough to know what. The latest item that had been placed in the tree (and which showed that the tradition still continued) was an American flag wrapped around the branches which overhung the road.
When I woke up, I couldn't shake it off. The dream was really troubling. After a few weeks, I decided making a trip to that road might trigger some thoughts, or maybe put the feeling to rest, whichever. We went down to the beginning of the road but didn't see anything unusual, so we drove all the way down to the other end. That's where we found the scene from the dream - the winding road, the branches, the flag...the sense of deja vu was dizzying. I haven't ever seen a flag wrapped around a tree like this before, but there it was. I took a picture, here:
http://victoriaphantasmagoria.tumblr.co ... eam-symbol
Was it a just a coincidence? Some trick of the unconscious to make me revisit the past? Some precognition or retro-psi? Does it mean anything at all? Why dream of that specific scene, in that specific place, where I haven't been in 15 years and then feel such a nagging pressure to go there? I'm still pondering these questions. There's not an easy answer, but it's interesting to think about.