It is not the first time I dreamed of my 2 dogs — having died a long time ago — returning in my arms, and each of them is very, very nice. I often wake up with a feeling of gratitude to be able to feel them once more.
But none of these dreams made an impact as much as this one. As I'm sitting here in a public work place, writing this dream between work, I'm trying hard not to cry again.
What set this dream apart from the others wasn't the details, no, all of them were as real as the one before: so real, I could feel the fur between my fingers as I petted them.
What made this dreams emotional impact so much stronger was the duration of the dream… It lasted hours, from the beginning to the moment the alarm clock went off. I was even able to say goodbye to them seconds before waking up.
The dream started with me being in the living room, it was implied that we had new dogs after missing our old ones so much, since it was so long after they died.
I was sitting on the couch as I looked down at the floor where 2 Belgian Shepherds started walking up to me.
It was here that I got lucid, realizing: “Those aren't new dogs, but my old ones!”
The second I realized this, the dream — which was set in the present — suddenly makes a jump back in time. As if I unlocked a part of my memory, the dogs remained the same while the room, its furniture, paint, things, all sifted back into the past, somewhere back to 2012.
It was beautiful, they weren't just there, they were young, healthy, and excited to see me. Their movements, their reactions, the way their fur felt on my hand, it was all identical to how I remembered it.
It was at this point the dream began to set itself apart from the other dreams where my dogs magically came back to me.
Not only did it reflect what I remembered of my dogs as real as possible — it also unlocked forgotten memories!
At some point, I moved to the hall just before the front door, one dog named Tafka went with me, the other stayed in the living room. In the hallway, the leashes of the dogs were neatly hanging exactly where they were when they both still lived.
This was … this hit me hard. I have to resist the tears while writing this part more than others. It was intense.
I began petting the dog for what felt like hours. I decided to go back to the living room to pet the other dog as well, when the alarm started going off. The strange thing was, that I was still inside the dream when the alarm began ringing, which gave me the opportunity to actually get up and say goodbye to them, which was exactly what I did: “Oops. It is time for me to go, but I will see you next time!”, were my exact words.
I woke up with an intense feeling of gratitude. Not only was I able to see them once more, but I was able to say goodbye. It gave me a form of peace that was impossible to fathom even for a dream.
Over the course of getting up, the dream was not yet ready to let me go. More memories of the past unlocked, and I started remembering large portions of days such as the days prior to having to put our dogs to sleep, causing me to cry once more. It hit me hard because I made peace with it, I didn't think that remembering everything again could make me cry again… but it did.
It was overall a very emotional ride, but I would do it all over again. If they made such an impact on me that they can come back to me a decade later and still make me cry, then it must've been one hell of a bond.