I’m not sure anything enriches and confuses our dreams more than those people we choose to "cast" in the tragedies, occasional comedies, historical dramas, and travelogues our subconscious minds produce for us while we sleep. The oddest collection of characters can show up, some we recognize, some we don’t, some we’re not sure about, appearing and disappearing, sometimes for the most obvious reasons and sometimes for no apparent reason at all, leaving us to wake up feeling fairly sure someone we spent time with during the night was trying to tell us something, if we could just figure out what it was.

Adding to the mystery and the intrigue is the fact that the people we summon, seek out, meet with, and envision during sleep are there for our purposes, at our insistence, as themselves and as archetypes, not just because of who they are but because of who they are to us.

"My deceased grandmother came to me out of nowhere," writes R.F. "She took my arm to stress the importance of what she was about to telepathically tell me. I was to contact Sylvia Browne to ask her about 'him.' Alive my abuelita only spoke Spanish, but telepathically she spoke perfect non-accented English. I got the feeling that 'him' was a reference to the boyfriend I recently broke up with, but I’m open to any other thoughts of who "him" might be.

This is a wonderful example of bringing in the heavy artillery while we sleep to make a point we’re reluctant to consciously accept. R.F. knows perfectly well that the "him" her grandmother was concerned about is her ex-boyfriend. She knows he’s emotionally dangerous to her and potentially physically dangerous as well, and that he has no intention of staying away permanently. Most of all, she knows that, left to her own devices, she might not have the strength of will to continue resisting him if he’s relentless enough and manipulative enough, especially since he’s so familiar with her weaknesses and how to use them against her. And so, rather than rely on her own sometimes clouded judgment (like all of ours from time to time, let’s face it), she summoned her grandmother, her abuelita, the person she trusted most, someone who’d always had R.F.’s best interests at heart, someone whose wisdom, strength and love she knew could empower her, someone who would never let something as trivial as "death" keep her away. Like the vast majority of messages received while we sleep, R.F.’s experience wasn’t a dream. It was an astral meeting between her and her grandmother, as real as any of the frequent conversations she’d had about her ex-boyfriend with "living" family and friends, with the advantage that she and Abuelita could speak volumes with the simple telepathic message about "him."