Dancing with Grandmother in Dreams

I like to play armchair dream interpreter from time to time when my dreams are full of layers. I often tell myself after a particularly interesting dream that I should be writing these down for future reference. Partially because it would be interesting to look back on them and reflect. Perhaps also some of them could be reimagined as stories to write about. Or, by writing them down I can look back on them and recognize that, to no one but myself, they weren’t very interesting.

Last night’s dream could end up being of the latter quality if only because it features several recurring themes that are more interesting to me than to you because of their history and for their recurrence.

The dream begins in the kitchen of my grandmother (we called her “Nanny”) and grandfather (“Poppy”). This is the first recurrence as many of my dreams tend to occur in places of my youth. Most prominently, those places are the house I grew up in in suburban central New Jersey and my grandparent’s house about 15 minutes away by car.

But, neither grandparent ever appears in this particular dream. Instead, one of my brothers and I are in there and we each smoke a cigarette, a habit I quit over five years ago but which seems to pop up from time to time in my dreams to this day. I have smoked with my dead mother, I have smoked alone. I have smoked and felt guilty about it, I have started to smoke and then thought against it.

We finish our cigarettes and, soon, my father comes into the kitchen. In the dream, I am conscious of how I shouldn’t be smoking, and of how noticeable the smell of smoke will be since we had just finished. But, that I smoked or whether my father notices it or not goes unspoken in the dream. Instead, I noticed something on, I think, his eyebrow. It could be a cut, it could be a bandage covering a cut, it could be a piece of tape. It was much clearer in the dream than it is in my memory but that is where we are as I recall a dream I had around 5 a.m. at 8 a.m.

While examining whatever happens to be on my father’s eyebrow, he comments that I should go into the dining room, adjacent to the kitchen in my grandparent’s house (it should be noted, in these dreams recalling places of my childhood, layouts just as often as not are different than what they are in real life. Yet, more often than not, when I have dreamed about my grandparent’s house, the layout is actually pretty faithful to reality. That could be a fun one for any armchair interpreters to interpret. Have at it). This, actually, I cannot confirm. He might have told me to go to the dining room, or I might have just found myself heading out there after examining my father’s eyebrow. In either case, when I do go there, I see that someone (possibly my other brother, but I cannot be sure) is finishing up dancing with someone who in my dream I accept as an old family friend who is considerably older in the dream than I remember and that I need to be careful of her frailty when I inevitably take over the dancing, which I do. In my memory of the dream now, I feel the closest connection to reality could be with a friend of my other grandmother who I would occasionally drive to the supermarket in the late 2000’s, along with that grandmother, and who sadly died at 87 in her retirement home and who was not found until a couple days later on the floor because she lived alone. It had been believed at the time she was trying to do something like change a lightbulb, had a heart attack and then collapsed. She had had a rough time of things years before, as she had become estranged from her only daughter, who at that point was her sole living family member. She might not have always been perfect in how she went about things in her life, but she didn’t deserve to go the way she did, alone.

Anyway, when I do take over for who I assume is my brother, the person that seemed a moment ago extremely frail seems to speak with a clarity that belies her advanced age. She talks about something or another, small talk that I cannot now recall and then we conclude or simple dance.

I move into the living room, where I see my other grandmother (which, we called “grandma,” to help differentiate her from the grandmother we called “Nanny,” the one which actually lived in the house in my dream. To make it even more confusing, they were sisters. Just go with it), who is noticeably frail in her old age, sitting on the couch, waiting for me to dance with her. She, like her friend I danced with in the dining room a moment ago, has been dead for a number of years. But, this is not something that occurs to me in the dream. It usually doesn’t.

I lift her up and she is mostly dead weight. She is able to stabilize herself somewhat under her shuffling feet and we slowly move toward the entryway between the living room and dining room, which she places her hand on the side as to further stabilize herself, and we begin to dance. It is a very slow dance, one that feels like something a five-year-old might perform with an old relative. What it lacks in rhythm it makes up for in sweetness.

This goes on for a few moments until several people pass through the dining room, into the living room and out the front door. Without much explanation in the dream I am aware these are some relatives whom I have lost connection with over the years, whom have come for a visit after a long time, and whom I seem to be familiar enough with to not be surprised by their presence. One of them, a girl in her early 20s, announces herself to me as “Jane,” a person in my dream I recall as having been very, very young the last time I saw her and whom I am surprised to see has all grown up. Of course, as you might guess, I have no relatives named Jane. But, there have been a number of relatives whom I lost touch with over the years, and whom I was surprised to see all grown up, either in pictures or in person. Over the years, my immediate family seemed to lose connection with a lot of family members, extended family, etc. for reasons too personal to go into on a public forum that can be seen around the world. I am sure my story is far from unique.

And that is where the dream ends. Slowly dancing with my mostly-incapacitated grandmother who has been dead since 2012 after dancing with presumably a friend of hers who has been dead even longer, while relatives from another reality pass through the house and make themselves, after sneaking a cheeky cigarette with my brother in the kitchen and checking on a curious smudge of some sort on my father’s face.

To me, because of my connections to the people and places in the dream, many which have continued to pop back up time and time and time again after years and years away from them, there is more emotional connection than for anyone reading this that has no idea who these people are, who I am, has no visual cues or history to connect anything to. Which means, it’s perfect for people to put their spins on what it all means, and whether or not it means anything or is simply a mishmash of memories that all happens to smack into each other in my mind in the middle of the night. Have fun with it.


JPDdoesROK is a former news editor/writer in New Jersey, USA, who served a one-year tour of duty in Dadaepo/Jangnim, Saha-gu, Busan from February 2013 to February 2014. He is now a teacher in Gimhae.