Or was it one long crazy dream?

Awoke one Saturday morning in late August this year from two vivid and distinctly different back to back dreams with faint memories of an earlier third. The two dreams flowed one into the other. It was as if I was in one dream and then lucidly recognized within the dream I was yet in another dream. To be clear, I did not unconsciously exhibit any powers to change or redirect the event of my dreams. Nor did I consciously manifest any such powers to affect such changes. Instead, I ran forward into the future, if you will, to experience what may occur from my own curiosity. The urgency of the moment within these two dreams felt so real and compelling. In weird, strange, and bizarre ways, yet in a loving way, my dreams took me across different timelines from California with an ex-lover into the Afterlife to chat with the dead and with a movie star and my youngest to paddle a muddy river in Virginia. Felt mind bending, confusing, and loving.

Both dreams occurred in Virginia, the state where I was born and, most of the time, raised. While I did spend much of my childhood, teenage, and young adult years in the Carolinas as well, I’ve also resided in the Pacific Northwest for the last 33, 34 years or so. Perhaps these dreams reflect an underlying, subconscious longing for where I spent my youth. Doesn’t mean the dreams are prophetic as in, oh, I shall move back to Virginia or North Carolina, no. This nostalgic pull is more the underlying canvas upon which my sleeping mind painted dreams upon so I may recognized other and otherwise unrelated clues. What, however, were and are these clues? What do these dreams even mean? And therein lies the mystery of unknown possibilities.

Do you remember dreams with a similar architecture or dreamscape? Let’s dive into these subterranean caverns of the psyche.

First dream in Blacksburg, Virginia at my Grandparents’ house: 

Visited my long-dead maternal grandparents alive in their wonderful big, old home in Blacksburg. It’s a college town up in the mountains in the middle of the western part of the state. Both died back in the 1990s, and this is year 2025. I felt so delighted to be back in their beautiful home so rich with many happy memories. I’d missed my grandparents and really missed their home on Draper Road there in town. My grandfather was a retired physics professor at Virginia Tech, and my grandmother used to teach history in the local hight school. I remembered these facts in the dream, so felt both surprised and delighted to see them again. Didn’t realize they were dead at first, I think, or found it hard to believe. Which seems bizarre as they were so obviously alive to me. Both grandparents appeared young, happier, healthier, and exhibited more vigor. Then it dawned on me during the dream this was me in reality visiting them in the Afterlife. Made me pause, again within this dream, and think, “Whoa, wow,” with amazement. 

It was also clear to me early on while dreaming their beloved old home was a construct on an astral-like plane in the Afterlife superimposed multidimensionally upon the location of the one back in my “real,” non-dream world. As certain things felt different such as walls, windows, floors, and furniture, at first things in the house confused me. Was this and that some new add-on I wasn’t informed occurred here? No, this infrastructure existed in a different vibrational plane. Walls were white and bare. Your mind could and would fill them with anything temporarily if you wanted. And I did. The moment my mind moved to something else other than art on the walls, whatever art had appeared upon the walls vanished. The walls reverted to blank whiteness.

Things also felt as if I was in a different timeline than the one I currently live in. In this timeline Gwen, who now goes by Vie back in “real-life,” and I never divorced. Still married, we lived in LA, not Seattle. She still went by Gwen in the dream. She was in LA with both our grown kids Dylan and Kate waiting for me to come on home from Virginia. In our mundane reality, however Vie and I finalized our divorce back in 2004, we remain friends and allies, and eventually we went on to marry other people. We also still live in the Greater Seattle metro area. So seeing them in my dream as still my wife Vie was a bit of a shock and also felt normal, good, and wholesome in a comfortable, natural way. Gwen/Vie also looked younger and more vibrant in this dream and sported long, blonde hair as she did during their 20s.

Oddly, Gwen and I communicated within the dream with an strange, smartfone-like device that amplifies telepathy and we could also see each other across the distance as if in a hologram videofone with the hologram projected outside the device. This device was, in the dream, was known to be matter-of-factly developed from old, reversed-engineered, so-called UFO/UAP/NHI technology. Within this dream I remembered I had another dream where she and I enjoyed sex together a few nights ago. My memory of that was a blurry romp in LA. But was that really an earlier dream? Or a dream inside of a dream? The dream of a memory of dream inside of this dream?

Then after we chatted via augmented telepathy, I was back with my long-deceased grandmother in her warm, welcoming home. My grandmother puttered around the kitchen and banged around the stove making all kinds of noise. She smiled and chuckled, wore an apron, and moved like a ballerina up on stage. She appeared fit, trim, and athletic. We had a happy conversation. She was glad to see me.  Then Grandma returned to her baking while we chatted. Then was hanging with granddad in his office where he sat near his old, short-wave radio. He also appeared younger, healthier, and physically fit. I asked him questions adult to adult. About this and that, not getting his PhD, working construction as a brick layer and stone mason during the Great Depression before getting his Master’s in Physics. What passions and hobbies did he truly enjoy engaging in back when he was alive? 

At some point I realized they weren’t asking me any questions. They didn’t need to ask me anything. They were in the Afterlife, after all, and already knew everything. What I felt the most from them was love. Pure love. Not the judgement and criticism they sometimes dished out back in real-life when I was a young “troublemaker.” They emanated love, radiated love, without ever speaking it out loud. Love, love blessed with a sense of gaiety and joy and also wisdom and introspection. Then we all said farewell, and I prepared to go back home to LA. They smiled and waved and kept puttering around their magnificent old home until the house dissolved into a matrix of numbers and colors.

Afterthoughts and Reflections:

The dream felt intensely real with the only thing remotely fantastical being the Afterlife part with my grandparents. The Non-Human Intelligence technology aspect with augmented telepathic holographic projection felt too everyday to feel fantastical. Felt as if I was living within an alternative timeline than the one we’re in now. In this timeline Gwen and I never got divorced, the mysteries of the Afterlife have been cracked, and UAP or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena had already been fully disclosed as real and present. Dreams that seem incredibly realistic affect me the most. Ever have dreams like that? Do you? Anyone?

Ironically, in my everyday “real life,” I always thought I would end up living in California. San Francisco and the BayArea are directly across from Richmond, Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay. Had originally wanted to go to college in SoCal, but my parents adamantly wouldn’t let me. They were overprotective of me as a nearly-Deaf child, smart, but “something’s not right” (from their intuitive sense for what we today call neurodivergence and learning disabilities). At some point, I chased after Gwen across the country to Washington, and we ended up moving there from Virginia and not to California. Two of my three kids as adults live in LA today, and the oldest in New York. Growing up in rural Virginia and the Carolinas back in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, California was often regarded as the faraway promised land.

Perhaps this dream was, regardless of the ways I arrived “there” in the Afterlife and regardless of the cool technologies and scrambled geographies, simply a beautiful way for my dear, long-gone maternal grandparents to reach out from the Afterlife to let me know they love me as I am. Perhaps the dream is a subconscious reminder even when times get difficult I am still loved regardless of circumstances. Love flows as a force all its own, and like water, air, and spirit gets in everywhere.

Between dreams…

The first dream completed without me awakening from my sleep. The second followed immediately and I found myself in a totally different world aware within the dream I was no longer in Blacksburg. I had already returned to Los Angeles to the dream characters of my wife and children, completed some business, and was now back in Virginia. This time, however, I was on Riverview Farm in Prince Edward County where I grew up. With new dream characters. Felt as if one dream flowed like a river down the mountain from one lake into the next.

Second dream on Riverview Farm in Autumn:

Found myself in the dirt and gravel driveway/farm road in front of the Old Bass Family Farmhouse. The road was lined by a row of dark green boxwood bushes. It was a sunny Autumn day with clouds on the horizon. The skies grew increasingly more cloudy, and the hardwood trees were already mostly bare with a few leaves still hanging on. Dark green conifers, mostly pines and cedars, punctuated the woods around us. We were going to canoe the Sandy River down the road. This Piedmont river curves around our farm on its way eventually into the Appomattox as it flows along the northern border of Prince Edward County. My youngest daughter, Talia, my stepdaughter with Kristina (who was not represented in this dream) and the American actor Mark Ruffalo were in my dream. We all struggled to load a big red canoe into the back of a bright blue pickup truck. Both were dressed, as was I, in blue jeans with flannel shirts layered over t-shirts to work on a farm. None of us were dressed to go paddling down a river, and I was taking my youngest down the river.

I felt initial surprise within the dream to discover Talia and a celebrity actor on the farm I grew up on. Talia was clearly my daughter in the dream as she is in real-life, and Mark Ruffalo, whom we’d not ever met before in real-life, was there as both an old family friend and farm laborer. The farm and its surroundings look like the way I remember my parents’ dairy farm back in the early to mid 1980s. The year in the dream, however, was now, 2025, but in real-life twas still Summer. The three of us worked together collectively as if we had long known each other on the farm although I was clearly out visiting from where I live (in the dream) in California. I don’t know why I was in Virginia as if on yet another timeline, but I accepted the situation to see what would happen. Felt so normal and yet so odd.

Talia sat in the front of the bright, robin’s-egg blue pickup truck while Mark Ruffalo drove. I rode in the back with the canoe. We left the tailgate down. We had to descend a long and windy, steep hill down to the river valley. As we chugged downhill, a hat appeared mashed and flattened on the truckbed. Was a dark blue hat with garnet colored bill. The hat promptly slid off the tailgate onto the road. I started to shout, “Stop!” Couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. It was just an old hat. The colors reminded me of where I went to college. Don’t know whose hat it was. None of us three were much on wearing hats anyway. This isn’t normal behavior for me, however, as I usually stop and pick up stuff and don’t like to litter.

Then a pile of socks slid off. What the hell? They were a tangled mess of gray, blue, garnet, black, and red argyle patterned socks. They weren’t there before either, just as the hat wasn’t. I sighed with exasperation and, again, strangely enough, didn’t say a word. Just let the damn socks go.

Mark drove on down and pulled into the large, river bottom cornfield there. It’s on my parents’ farm property and had recently been harvested with rows of decaying corn stubs sticking out of the soil left behind as is commonly done. On the other side of the river were wild woods and swamps knitted up by beaver dams. Also owned by my family. In today’s waking real-life the river, the low ground farm fields, woods, ravines, and swamps lay beneath a large lake, the Sandy River Reservoir. In real-life construction began in the early 1990s after land ownership disputes were settled by County and State and completed in 1994. In this dream, however, the year was 2025 and the land still looked as it did 40 years earlier.

No one else was there. Just us. After we parked and got out of the truck, I finally spoke up.

“Mark,” I said, “you gotta go back and get those socks and hat on the way back uphill.”

He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know anything about those, only we had to unload the canoe. Later, OK? OK.

We were at the take-out for the canoe run. Unloaded the canoe. We walked across the wide, flat cornfield towards the treelike where the river lay to reach the put-in. We strode past other paddlers sitting in camping chairs. They had wet padding gear strewn about and were laughing, drinking beer, and toasting each other. 

I felt confused in the dream as certain things didn’t make any sense. Where did all those other paddlers suddenly appear from? There wasn’t anyone else in the field. It made no sense the put-in and the take-out for the river run were so close together as to walk back and forth between them. In real-life, river access points were usually many miles apart and paddlers have to set up shuttles. Also in real-life Sandy River was a sluggish, log choked, flat water stream meandering thru the Virginia Piedmont. In bygone days farmers worked together to keep the river clear so it wouldn’t flood their crops, but those times were gone. In this dream Sandy River was a whitewater stream. In real-life I was a whitewater kayaker for many years and did some whitewater canoeing and rafting. I also liked to explore swamps and marshes, and once explored the beaver swamps of the area with my river kayak. Even pushed thru big, orb weaver spiderwebs to scoot over beaver dams. Just not in this dream.

We pushed thru the bushes and trees to the river to discover the water was low. Very low. A channel carved across the exposed, muddy river bottom and narrowed down into a little gorge too narrow for the canoe. 

“We can portage that,” I said. “No problem.”

Talia looked but didn’t say much. Mark chatted on and on making quixotical faces with his forehead deeply furrowed over busy eyebrows. He huffed and puffed as he rambled on. Suddenly the put-in became the take-out. I was the only one to feel confused, however, and the other two were ho-hum, matter-of-fact about the switcheroo. We go back to the truck, placed the canoe back in the truck bed, got in, and drove back around up a dirt road thru the woods to the headwaters.

Apparently in the dream I’d chosen an easy river for Talia to canoe with me. Had a few small class 1-2 whitewater rapids. Easy. I warned her she gotta get down on her knees to stroke with her paddle and not sit up like in a chair all La La La on a flat lake. Gotta put yer belly into each stroke so you don’t wear out shoulders and arms. OK? OK, Dad!

Meanwhile within dream still couldn’t figure out what the hell Mark Ruffalo was doing in my dream. In real-life never met him before; only seen him in shows and movies. Really liked him as an actor, too. Felt respect for him. Towards the end of this dream, however, crazy thoughts popped up in my dream mind. Was he Talia’s different biological father instead of Sean’s in this particular timeline? Or was he my brother? Gosh, I didn’t have any dream answers. Right now we had to paddle!

I woke up. Groggy. Had to pee. Boom. Dream over. Just.like.that.

What in the world does any of it mean?

I have no idea. What do you think and feel? Go ahead and tell me. Please. Thank you!

One thing I’ll add is an intense dislike of myself playing small when I could otherwise be playing big. Often I’ll speak up and put my head and neck out there, so to speak, but sometimes I don’t. I play small. Fail to speak up when I know I should, and just go along with the flow even if I question it. My curiosity sometimes leads me astray and distracts me from the focus necessary to complete the tasks at hand. Not often, but often enough. So perhaps these two back to back dreams are an internal way to act out and recognize these behaviors in myself.

These dreams don’t feel prophetic. My roots are in the Pacific Northwest and back in Virginia and the Carolinas, so I don’t see myself living in California. While my ex-wife Gwen/Vie and I remain good friends, I don’t see us re-marrying as we are already married to other spouses. The most true, real-feeling (not realistic, mind you, but real-feeling) aspect of these dreams, oddly, was the precious interactions with my long-dead grandparents in the Afterlife. Their capacity as spiritual beings to radiate love without judgment was a profound, humbling, and nourishing experience. I love them! Even despite all those memories of long ago arguments, upsets, and disappointments. Yes, love is the most powerful force in the realms of Consciousness.

 

William Dudley Bass
Saturday 23 August 2025
Sunday 7 September 2025
Monday 8 September 2025
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol

 

Copyright © 2025 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

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