Connecting with my Dad & Virginia

Tonight I participated in a psychic medium reading—an event that was part of the Oregon Ghost Conference. Joshua Johns is the psychic medium.

He connected with my dad and with Virginia.

Dad:

He got a sense that we didn’t bond until later in life, not when I was a kid. He wasn’t necessarily a bad parent. (I said yes, we didn’t bond until ten years before he died. I didn’t get into the details—getting disillusioned with the other side of the family, which demonized my dad.)

He asked if I have half-siblings. (I said yes, I have a half-brother and two full siblings.) He asked if my dad met my half-brother, and I said no—at least, I don’t think so. (But he did know about him, because he was the second person—after my cousin Teddi—who told me that he knew my mother had a baby and put him up for adoption before they married, and he didn’t hold it against her. Both he and Teddi thought the dad was Uncle David, but it turns out a DNA test proved he wasn’t.) My dad is fine with the half-brother. He’s glad we connected. Impression that I was responsible for getting in touch with my half-brother (I suppose initially, since I found out about him fifteen years before we got in touch, and I told my siblings about him back then. I’m not the one whose DNA test made the connection.)

Virginia:

At first he was getting two cats, and I figured he meant Cheetah and Virginia. Cheetah appeared in one of my dreams fairly recently. But he mentioned an orange tabby (Tigger from years ago, maybe?) and then:

He said he’s getting the kind of cat in Meet the Fockers… not necessarily a ragdoll… a Siamese? (Yes, a Siamese mix.)

“I keep getting ‘She didn’t know. She didn’t know. She didn’t know.’” (For five weeks I keep trying to reunite with her because I thought she was alive. I mentioned the 5 weeks of searching and how both a K9 Search & Rescue guy and an animal communicator thought she was taken away in a car.)

“I get a sense that this cat cannot be kept inside.” The moment the door is open a crack, she’s out. (She insisted on going outside.)

She doesn’t think of herself as my pet. She thinks of me as hers. (That makes sense, because she treated me like a kitten. I didn’t talk about this, but: she’d place her paws on my shoulders and groom my face as though I were a kitten.)

“She wants you to know she’s okay. Do not feel guilty. We always feel guilty as parents. It wasn’t your fault.”

Don’t feel bad about how long it takes to grieve. You don’t quickly go through grief—sometimes it takes years. Take your time.

A Bizarre Dream involving Death

I had such a bizarre dream.

I borrowed a large vehicle from a friend—but the vehicle belonged to her bourgeois parents (we were young, in our 20s I think). I was driving after dark and had another friend the passenger seat—a very sickly elderly man.

While we were driving in traffic after dark, something happened—I think I had to stop abruptly—may have damaged the car—the old man slid to the floor of the front passenger seat and was crumpled and looked kind of like a deflated beach ball. He wore khaki pants and a bright green shirt.

I knew he must be dead. I knew I had to do something. I remembered a plastic bag in the back of the car and figured I would put him in that for now.

Next thing I remember: I had the same vehicle at an auto shop. It was parked and waiting, and I was out of the car when a couple of young female friends got in and sat—in the front seat.

The “driver” chatted with me cheerfully (I was standing next to the driver’s side door). Next to her, our friend was young, probably teen, and petite and blond. I wondered that she wasn’t aware of the corpse at her feet—at least, I was pretty sure he was still there.

I may have spoken to someone who worked on the car. I felt vaguely aware that my friend’s parents would be furious about their car.

Next the car was full of friends of mine, at least five, including 2 Indian women trying to make room in the back seat, even though there were all these plastic bags on the floor of at least the right side of the back seat. With that car door open, I opened a couple bags and discovered that I had sparkly Indian fabric, probably enough to make a couple saris.

Meanwhile, I was aware that somehow the corpse was behind that back seat, in a third section of the car—a second back seat. This brought some confusion in my mind, because I remembered him dying in the front passenger seat and I tried to think through how he could have moved.

 

Not sure if this was the same dream, but I was at a big craft store—a shop like Michael’s or Hobby Lobby (even though I’ve avoided the latter since finding out that the CEO is a homophobic fundamentalist Xian). Anyway, we were chatting in an aisle where I noticed rolled up remnants that included sparkly Indian fabric.

I briefly spotted something yellow and gold that looked beautiful, so I rummaged through and instead of finding what I thought I’d seen, I pulled out a remnant for a less pretty piece of sparkly yellow and gold Indian fabric. In any case, I was thinking about doll clothing while looking through those remnants.

On a lower shelf, I spotted something that seemed to match some of the fabric… and turned out to be bits of Asian newspaper wrapped around and separating little red plates that looked Chinese somehow (probably the color) and each featured an image of a cat.

During all this, I was chatting with Shelly, and at the end of the dream I was telling her that I should have dropped out of Portland Metro Veggies years before I did–like a month after my dad died.

And I woke up—groggy but imagining that I was adding that PMV was wonderful back in the early days, when James was very active as an organizer, and it sucked after that asshole Mathew took over.

 

I dreamed that I was staying at a hotel or someplace and had my own room but was with about four friends… though one of the people was a young woman we didn’t trust and didn’t know so well. I’m not sure why we didn’t trust her—maybe she was out prisoner, or maybe she had a personality disorder.

At some point, I was alone in my hotel room—a comfortable room. The bed was messy and I just woke from a nap.

It was raining steadily and somewhat loudly, and I was tempted to open a window and drifted toward a window at the far end of the room… but I figured the rain would get inside.

On a small table centered against that far wall, I had a little paper bag containing some leftovers from a run someone did out there in the world, one of the friends I was with. I looked inside and was happy to notice a couple of beverages in the bottom, one containing caffeine (it looked like the last kind of bottle Bhakta Chai came in before it disappeared). I looked forward to drinking that immediately. But there were a few other little things, like packets of condiments and a couple of individually wrapped forks (it looked suspiciously like this came from a fast food joint).