Curiously, on the same week that I joined the Depth Alliance, I had the most prophetic dream of my entire life. I'll try to make it brief. It is absolutely worth your time. I am still shivering over it. Here is the dream. [Note that my father died some 45 years ago]
| I had this dream last night that my father was staying over at my house. He was planning to leave, but I decided to finally ask my father where he was living, now that his is living without my mother. He was reluctant to give me his address. I said, why the reluctance? He said he couldn't find the street address. We looked for his driver's license. I said its obviously on your drivers license. Again, he couldn't find it, and I said to myself he was being passive aggressive. He didn't want my brother Jim and me to know where he lived.
I said where is it? Is it in Michigan? He said its in the "Midwest," a peculiar response from my father. I said "can't you do better than that? What's the zip code?" He could only remember the first three digits 625, and I said 625 what? Finally he said 62510.
I woke up from the frustrating dream at that moment and kind of wondered why I didn't try to get the entire addres from him. Then I suddenly realized my father is dead and has been dead for a long time.
So that was the frustrating dream, but after I woke up from it I decided to look up where the 62510 zip code is.
Its in the Midwest, all right, and it is at Assumption, Illinois.
If you check Google for 62510, you get Assumption, Illinois.
I was raised Catholic and I remember the "Assumption of the Blessed Virgin," a feast day for the time that Mary went to heaven (with her body).
From Wikipedia about the religious significance of the Assumption: "In religion, an assumption is the bodily translation of an individual person, either living or dead, from earth to heaven."
Freaked me out when I read that.
In other words, my father informed me that his address was in Assumption, Illinois, the place where a person goes from earth to heaven.
The fact that I had never heard of Assumption, Illinois, plus the fact that I had never ever looked up the zip code to that place (population 1100), indicated to me that this information came from outside my skull. This is either to most incredible and improbabe coincidence, or this is information that came into my psyche from some source OUTSIDE my psyche.
A genuine paranormal experience. A genuine spiritual experience.
I just finished writing a book entitled Psyche's Exile: an empirical odyssey in search of the soul. (On Amazon, Kindle, Nook, etc). I wish I could have included this dream in my book. This is entirely revelatory.
I'm new to Depth Alliance, so I hope I am sharing this intimate experience with the right people. Staggering!
Jerry Kroth, Ph.D.
Associate Professor Emeritus
Santa Clara University
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Replies
Jerry, I wouldn't consider this to have come from OUTSIDE of yourself.
Consider that in the deeper levels of the unconscious, there's no distinction between time and space, here and there. If our consciousness is emerged from a deeper common level, everyone is connected at the level of the collective unconscious. Imagine a circle and every spike that rises from this circle is an individual, separate in its peak but connected at its basis. Of course one could shout that this is new-agey and there's nothing proved on that aspect of the collective unconscious (perhaps even Jungians would warn me against this understanding), well, I don't claim to have any proof besides the experiences of people, people experience stuff that is not bound to causality, space and time, I have no pretention to explain how it happens, but it's a reality that it simply does happen.
After starting doing more active imagination, synchronicities have been ocurring a lot more to me lately.
Jerry! Wow!--I have goosebumps reading your dream. Thanks for taking the time to share it. For some reason, it reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Jung, when he wrote at the end of Memories, Dreams, Reflections (also the end of his life, of course): "There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being". (p. 358). This underlying solidarity and continuity--we might even call it the Unconscious?-- is something I relate to from my own numinous dreams and experiences.
There is one other aspect which you are probably aware of as well. Jung wrote about the assumption of Mary in "Answer to Job" and was quite happy to conclude the Catholic Church's acceptance of the "event" in 1950 translated into a symbolic acceptance of the emergence of the feminine into contemporary culture. I would never presume to tell you what your dream means for you, and I think you've done an amazing job of conveying it--but whether we look at the feminine as Mother Earth, feminine values and ways of being in the world, or a combination of both, or the Unconscious, your dream may also have further implications for you--and for all of us--of the power of the feminine showing up in the American midwest. Couldn't be a bad thing! This is all a testament to why I love depth psychology so much--a powerful way of interpreting and making meaning of our being in the world. Again, thanks for letting us all share your experience--and good luck with the new book!