Cracking my head open like an egg.
Dreams from the In Between
There’s a moment, just before waking, when a dream still clings to you.
Like smoke on your clothes. Like a half remembered name.
You blink, and it’s gone. But some dreams don’t let go that easily.
Some dreams follow you for thirty years.
I don’t think dreams are random.
I think they’re messages from the part of ourselves that speaks in symbols instead of sentences.
The part that remembers everything even the things we’d rather forget.
They show us where we’re stuck. What we’re hiding. And sometimes, what we’re ready to become.
I’ve had two dreams lately that feel like chapters in the same story.
A story I’ve been carrying for too long.
A story I’m finally ready to tell.
Part One: Slides from Another Life
The first dream was quiet. Nostalgic. Subtly dangerous.
I met a man about ten years older than me. The kind of guy who wears confidence like a tailored jacket. He had a son in his twenties and an ex wife who lingered like a perfume you can’t quite place. We talked about music and skateboarding, my old lifelines.
We were friendly. Maybe too friendly.
There was tension beneath the surface.
He was trying to one up me, not with hostility, but with charm. Like he was performing coolness because he had nothing else left. Constantly one up me with every aspect of life.
His ex wife flirted with me in the background elegant, tipsy, haunted.
She stepped accidentally on one of my music devices. I think it was a hybrid vintage cassette player and mini modular synth. Something I’d made. Something delicate.
Later, the son told me what happened.
That his drunk mother crushed my instrument, almost with intent.
His voice carried a warning.
Then, my Uncle Bill appeared and handed me a box of old photo slides.
Inside the box: snapshots of the man’s past.
Fast cars. Racing trophies. The perfect life in still frames. From the outside it looked like he had the picture perfect consumer life.
But something was missing.
His wife was barely in the photos.
The son looked like a guest in his own childhood.
The man looked happy in the way people pose for the camera like they’re trying to prove it to someone. “Hey look at me with all my trappings of the perfect life” while filled with dread and debt.
The Symbolism
The slides were the real message.
Artifacts from a life that had all the right elements success, beauty, admiration but felt hollow. A life I had grown up wanting. A life I almost had.
They reminded me of how easy it is to build a life that looks good on paper and feels like a ghost town inside. The life that I thought I wanted or more importantly needed to be happy and feel successful.
The music device, crushed underfoot, was something more fragile my creative voice, maybe. My soul’s instrument. Stepped on casually, intentionally, in the shuffle of someone else’s unresolved love story.
And the son a younger presence, watching it all unfold might have been me. A version of myself studying the future like it’s already been written, hoping to make a different choice.
I constantly wrestle with the “what if?”
Part Two: A Devil in the Temple
This dream has been with me since I was young.
It returns when I’m at a crossroads.
And I’m at one now.
I woke up in Hue, Vietnam 3:47 AM. Heart racing.
I grab my phone and whisper a nasally voice note in the dark, the fan hums in the background.
The words tumble out sideways half sleep, half prophecy:
The Symbols Speak
The child is my innocence. My truth. My instinct.
The adult version looming, silent, controlling is what happens when that truth gets buried.
When a child learns not to speak, not to rock the boat, not to be too much.
The car represents who’s driving your life?
In this dream, I’m always in the back seat.
Until now.
The hotel set in Thailand, a place where I lived and am now spiritually circling again is the place I’ve never quite entered.
It represents initiation, truth, awakening.
But something always keeps me from reaching it.
The devil isn’t pitchfork and fire.
He’s the force that whispers: “Don’t tell. Don’t trust. Don’t change.”
He thrives in silence.
And I’ve given him decades of it.
The Thread Between the Dreams
In Slides from Another Life, I’m being shown a version of my future a man surrounded by trophies but alone with his curated past.
In A Devil in the Temple, I’m being tested.
Do I speak?
Do I break the spell?
Do I take the wheel and drive toward the temple?
These dreams are not just stories.
They’re thresholds.
They’re saying: choose.
Speak.
Wake up.
Move forward.
And So I Did
I left everything behind.
I walked away from the Midwest, from friends, love and from the comfort of familiar pain.
I sold my things. Gave away what I couldn’t carry.
Got on a plane with a one way ticket and no five-year plan.
Because the dreams wouldn’t stop.
And because I finally started listening.
Now I’m here.
In the In Between.
And the air is thick with meaning.
Dreams are not stories we forget.
They are maps we must learn to read.
And if we follow them long enough
they may just lead us home.
Love & Light
MM