Dream Revealing the Truth October 16, 1998
This dream makes more sense as I rewrite it today than it did at the time it occurred. It told me things about the early days of the family that came to raise me, my adoptive Canadian family.
I somehow ended up in a room with my adoptive father Duncan. In the dream I was not interested in talking to him or even seeing him, but he insisted on talking to me.
He explained he wasn’t so bad when he was young. His biggest problem was he could not find personal success, which would obviously affect not only his survival but that of his young family. He could not get a good paying job to support his new family and it was during this time he met someone who was willing to help him. They struck a deal, in his mind a job, and this was the beginning of things going right for him. He believed that once he had reached a certain level of success he would be able to separate from this man and regain his independence.
The strange part about this area of the dream was what began to happen to him as he spoke. His face became a mask, and his body a shell, so that he was ultimately just a voice. As he talked I took hold of this empty body and starting with the mask, I began tearing it apart, ripping it into small pieces. I was making a pile that I intended to burn when finished, a process I felt would be very therapeutic. I could feel my anger towards him lessen with each piece I added to the pile. All through this, he continued talking, oblivious at what I was doing to him.
He said that even though it started out taking a small amount of his time, the demands on him increased as time passed, becoming more difficult and weird. It was now obvious this was not something from which he would easily be able to break free. The man he had met now had complete control, so in order to keep his family safe he would continue to serve.
He began to tell me how I came to be with them. He said the woman I thought of as my mother was not the one who carried me. There were five other women he knew that were part of this circle in which he was involved because of his obligations to this man.
He said I was the daughter of one of these women. He would not tell me which was my mother, nor would he tell me anything about her. I must have awakened at this time because I can’t remember what transpired after that point. Unfortunately, many of the details describing how I came to live with them were lost. At the time it seemed more important to focus on the realization about my mother.
As I lay in bed going over what he said to me I remember thinking it was amazing how my adoptive mother, Helen, had managed to convince everyone it was her who had carried me.
At first I wondered if I was perhaps a twin, but while copying this dream I began to see it was more likely she had been pregnant with a child that died shortly after birth. It would also explain her difficulty accepting me as her own, never able to show me genuine love and affection. Likely a significant part of her had not agreed to the deal that made me part of this family.
There are things regarding my looks as a child I did not understand. Though it may sound strange, when I looked in the mirror I expected to see someone else, or at least a different me. I thought my eyes should be brown and my hair dark, auburn with red highlights. I think for this reason I did not like looking in the mirror, nor did I like getting my picture taken.
I did not see myself, I saw someone I didn’t recognize and it frightened me. Perhaps this is another reason there are so few pictures of me as a pre school child. Once I was in school it was inevitable I would have pictures taken and I eventually accepted that, but I was never comfortable with having my picture taken.
In the effort to discover my real identity I have considered the possibility the deceased child was named Brenda, and because there were neighbours and friends who had met her during her short life, my name was changed in order to take her place. This would also explain the pictures of a baby that was supposed to be me, but looks nothing like me.*
This was a fascinating dream to have, especially knowing what I know now. It supports my findings in the years since, giving me hope I will indeed one day find my home.
It should be added that Duncan and Helen lived comfortably in upscale Eau Claire Estates alongside the Bow river after selling their home and ‘losing everything,’ the end result of the protracted legal battle against the Bank of Nova Scotia. Duncan won the initial judgement over wrongful charging of interest yet was subsequently buried in a paper tsunami on appeal, taking them into bankruptcy—or something they wanted us to believe was bankruptcy but was something altogether different. Originally the bank filed charges against Duncan shortly before my first child, Joshua, was born in December 1981. For the past seventeen years Duncan has not worked yet has maintained a lifestyle of the wealthy, residing on Burrard, the main financial street in Vancouver.
Now a number of years since Helen died, Duncan continues to live on Burrard and has not worked since the onset of the legal case several decades prior. Curious how they could afford such luxurious accommodation after ‘losing everything’ and ‘being on a strict budget,’ always complaining of being poor. Words can have very different meanings to different people; Duncan and Helen fully qualified as different.
*see Passport, Chapter I, page 21
0 Comments