A Ghost Wedding in the Future leads to healing long buried Grief from the Past

Recurring dreams are rare for me. When they do occur, however, they return over and over and over again. They distract me from my daily real-life responsibilities with a growing obsession with efforts to determine just what in the world do these wild dreams mean? What did they mean back then? What do they mean now? And do the meanings of one person’s dreams ever represent anything for any other person?

Had a dream back in February 2020 as the COVID-19 Pandemic was spreading around our planet that recurred so often the dream haunted me even while awake. The dream was unusually short in duration and didn’t peel off into a reel of others. So often one dream would roll into another and then into another, each one a different dream yet all seem interconnected and linked together like books in The Bible. Perhaps what felt most intriguing and somewhat disturbing was what and who were not in this odd dream such as current partners. The dream felt more realistic and less fantastical, and it also felt incredibly prophetic. To come true, however, the events within the dream would have to go against the grain of current, on-going, real-life relationships. As it turns out, this dream unleashed a torrent of long-buried pain and, ultimately, resolution and liberation. My subconscious had to jack hammer it into my awareness more than five years after I first experienced this dream.

The Dream:

The entirety of the dream was in black, white, and shades of gray. There weren’t any other colors. Everything was as in old but clear black and white fotos and videos from bygone days. The dream felt so real I would swear it was real if it weren’t for its black and white elements. Everything felt vivid, sharp, and as crisp as tuxedos fresh from a tux shop.

The dream was set somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Felt like somewhere in Seattle, but it could’ve been set in a wooded park or a sanctuary anywhere out in nature. The location was clearly inside of a church, but the ceremony about to occur wasn’t representative of any particular religion. The hilltop chapel at Discovery Park above the sea comes to mind, but it’s been shuttered for ages. I’ve never been inside. Kristina and I in real-life, however, once considered getting married there back in our day.

Also, there wasn’t any sound in my dream. There weren’t any audible or telepathic sounds at all.

Only three people are in the dream. Just three Earth Humans: Edan, Kristina, and me. We are all a bit older than we are now. Thus this dream is set about a decade or so ahead along our current future timeline.

In real-life as in the dream Kristina is my third ex-wife and still good friend. We’ve been together since late 2001, separated across 2012, and our divorce was finalized in July 2013. We helped raise three children together along with our previous spouses. Other than Kristina, none of these good people, however, were in the dream. The remembrance of the above facts, however, was present in my dream-mind at the time.

Edan, in real-life, is among my closest friends. He was a former housemate of Kristina’s and mine from our early Dragonfly Community days. Edan also has a background in spirituality, psychology, and ceremonial rituals. We met in a Body Electric workshop in October 2000, and he introduced Gwen and I to Kristina in February 2001. In real-life, Edan told Kristina and me, separately, the two of us must meet in person shortly after he and I first met in the workshop. There was a sense of destiny at play amongst as well. He played a major role during the ceremonies where Kristina and I publicly formalized our May 2005 private bedroom marriage with a ritual-heavy, public wedding outdoors in July 2009. Edan also came from a New Age Christian Naturist background and was rediscovering his Jewish roots and starting to attend a progressive synagogue. These real-day facts were present in the enhanced awareness of the dream.

During the time I dreamed the dream, I lived in a small, informal intentional community on the Ballard-facing side of Phinney Ridge in the northern section of Seattle. Had been separated and divorced from Kristina for nearly 7-8 years. Was still single and wasn’t dating anyone. Wasn’t planning to either.

In this dream, Kristina and I remarried one another. Edan officiated the wedding. It felt sad, as we were all so old after so many years apart. We, at least these three dream characters, also felt a quiet joy, relief, humility, and patience. We were all so glad! Things felt right in this dream. We were back together again after being apart for so long…which allowed for the deep work necessary to work on ourselves as individuals before getting back together decades later inside this dream.

Edan, who is shorter than me and Kristina, stood over us from the elevated pulpit inside the front of the church. He wore the robes of the priesthood, which priesthood I don’t know, but he confidently guided us all thru the ceremony. He spoke a lot, but we weren’t able to hear anything except the silence itself. 

Kristina and I stood together smiling as we took turns looking up at Edan and at each other. We held hands. Her grip was strong, almost fierce. She appeared so elderly. Her once jet-black hair was silver and gray. Her crinkly eyes and wrinkles made her beautiful, even radiant in her old age. I was even older, being not quite a decade ahead of her, and felt both frail and strong. The thought popped up if Kristina were to thump me on the chest with her fist and chuckle lustily as she was wont to do back in the day, good Lord, she might just knock my old ass over! My hair, however, was as shaggy and white as a Colorado blizzard. Hey, at least I still had hair! 

We could sense other people behind us inside the rest of the church. I assumed they were all fellow human beings. Maybe a visitor representing some species of NHI or Non-Human Intelligence was there, but I couldn’t tell. In fact couldn’t discern anyone clearly. Felt like a century had passed since Disclosure, and beings from other worlds were openly out and about amongst us. Except the only visible entities were us three Humans. To be clear, within my dream I could only see the rest of myself from my own eyes, my friend Edan, and my ex, Kristina. I also, however, sensed the presence of many other people both Human and Non-Human.

Kristina and I along with Edan who was marrying us were illuminated by a large, circular beam of light. The light seemed electric, technological, in origin, even UFO-like, and this light felt sacred. As if the Divine Its Own Holy Self shined down to embrace the three of us. We were as The Holy Three before One Ultimate God, a divine being immanent, omniscient, omnipresent, and yet able to embody itself in living flesh born from anyone. Any combination of persons was a manifestation of the Holy Whole, but this one was ours. The ceremony felt intensely intimate and spiritual. 

At the same time the dream felt as it the whole thing played out as a ghost story. Once, within the dream, I remember thinking, “Oh, thank God we’re this is not another reenactment of A Christmas Carol in with all those ghosts back in freezing cold Old Victorian England.” Here instead manifested a lonesome tale of two people in Seattle who once loved and appreciated each other but who were unable to reconcile and heal as they waited too long and too late to repair and make amends. Not just with this particular ex-lover either, but with anyone and everyone whom I may have harmed in my past even if unintentionally. This message was for anyone for whom it resonated. Maybe that’s what we “Holy Three before One God” were, ghosts reenacting the story over and over again in some alternative timeline. Wedding ghosts. Aye, maybe that is what we were, wedding ghosts.

At the designated time, Kristina and I turned to face each other before Edan, before God, before anyone and everyone there whether human or non-human, to kiss. I felt a spark of electricity jolt between us. It nearly erotic, but nothing with the vitality and intensity we generated in more rambunctious times many years ago. Nor did it need to be. We were already deep, the two of us. 

As we began to kiss at our ghost wedding, I woke up as our lips touched. Indeed, I jerked awake with a start, flooded with a churn of emotions, thoughts, and feelings.

Recurrences:

Starting sometime in February of 2020, I woke from this dream several mornings in a row. It came on every night. Then dreamed the exact same ghostly dream several nights a week for several months. Then it slowed down to once a month, and then once in a long while, and finally, by 2023, the recurrences had stopped. Yet I can remember the details of this dream as if I just woke up.

The dream did not at all feel negative. I’ve had repeating dreams in the past such as kayaking over huge, tall waterfalls to plunge down a never-ending distance before waking up, or falling from a great height thru the sky, or falling from a mountain cliff, and so forth. There was a mix of adventure, surprise, and fear in those dreams. This one of being like wedding ghosts in the future didn’t feel anything like those.

Some sleep experts and psychologists believe recurring or repeating dreams represent one’s unmet, often unspoken or publicly acknowledged, needs. Others think such dreams have more to do with our subconscious or unconscious aspects of self seeking to resolve past traumas, mistakes, problems or right past wrongs. Perhaps our sleeping minds desire to act out these dramas as a play upon a stage with the dream being the stage. Pent-up energies need release as water behind a dam, but without destroying what lays downstream. Part of me wanted this dream to be true, while other aspects of me only if we were both single and were clear about boundaries. Such dreams are all about the dreamer, not the real-life people who aren’t actually in the dream but whose characters were placed there by the mind of the dreamer.

Others of a more mystical persuasion feel the rich symbolism itself has multiple meanings apart from one’s Freudian subconscious, tho such meanings are rooted in the manner of one’s unique cultural expressions. Dreams could be real premonitions, warnings, or messages from spiritual entities, spirit guides, guardian angels, and departed loved ones. Such dreams may be unconscious attempts by subconscious selves seeking to communicate with each other mind to mind and between any number of minds in simultaneous connection. Recurring dreams may entail a sense of urgency in addressing a specific topic, event, or person. All together, such dreams may inspire a deeper exploration into the mysteries of consciousness. Such dreams could be about anything, including the subconscious minds of real-life people seeking to connect somehow with the one dreaming the dream.

Other factors behind the scenes of this dream:

Those three-layered ghostly wedding vows, spoken in the future within the silence, felt familiar. They riffed off the real-life vows Kristina and I made to each other before God, to God, and to our children back in July 2009. Ours was a large, religiously complex wedding outdoors in North Beach Park in the View Ridge neighborhood of Seattle. Known as an authentic and generous person, Edan was a man of enormous service during this time.

What’s odd, however, was where Kristina and I were at in real-life back in February 2020. She had already remarried and was with Brandon, her third and current husband. She and I got along well, and even went on a walk together a couple times a year or so. We enjoyed the holidays with the rest of our extended Seattle neo-tribe, what the kids call theirs and our “Big Family!” We were not a couple, tho, and while we did sometimes discussed the energy of attraction still there between us, we also chose not to act upon it. We never did the post-divorce date-the-ex thang. 

Also in 2020 I had not yet met Faithlyn, whom I was to later marry in July of 2023. Never even heard of her until June of that year after she wrote me an email from Virginia. She inquired into the history of my locally famous late Great-Uncle Aumon Bass with his wife Mary Scott Bass and their pioneering work with Deaf children. Faithlyn and I finally met face to face in July 2020, and one thing led to another. Even so, this dream kept occurring until it faded away the same way an old black and white foto would fade in the Sun.

The dream also lost its intensity towards the end. In the beginning the dream invoked erotic passion, nostalgia, regret, lessons learned, and wishful thinking. This dream of the night began to feel more and more like the daydream of some bored college boy gazing out the windows during math class feeling horny for his hot, faraway girlfriend just before his bemused professor calls upon him.

A deeper Grief unfolds:

Probably this dream arose more from long buried feelings from a traumatic divorce. Romance and plans for a lifetime together skewered by blazing fires and loss upon loss after yet more loss. My divorce from Kristina was one of tremendous heartbreak and life turmoil. I suffered Broken Heart Syndrome across 2012-2013 and was struggling with Severe Episodic Depression at the same time. The latter lasted from March 2010 when the House Fire sent me over the edge to the spring of 2014 by which time the depression had faded away. The two of them together were awful. They were terrible, eviscerating illnesses. So glad those long, blurry years have passed. Kristina and I had both lost our full-time, high paying jobs, both our homes, and our savings and investments during the Great Recession and the embezzlement.

What I call my “Hard Times Period” lasted from 2008 all the way into 2019. That’s nearly a decade of my life. Didn’t have time to heal much or the money to date as I would have liked. Didn’t have time to grieve deeply. Instead simply got used to feeling the grief from afar. Was just too busy doing too many other things. While I did do a lot of deep work on myself, addressed many issues, and experienced enormous personal growth, I still hadn’t resolved many of the psychological issues from my previous divorce.

To be clear, my Hard Times period wasn’t all bad. Did some travel, reconnected with family and friends, experienced profound spiritual awakenings and mystical growth, met and dated a small number of remarkable women, and encountered several UFOs/UAPs. Delighted in somehow still managed to guide my children thru their messy teens (with a bit of help from their mothers and others). Embarked on challenging and rewarding backcountry adventures into the remote mountain wilderness and wild seashores of the Pacific Northwest. Yes, enjoyed some good times, too. Read books, watched movies and shows, and engaged in both amateur photography and creative writing projects.

Broken hearts take a long time to mend, tho, and mine certainly did. Am grateful to all who helped me along the way during those volatile times. As I finish up this article today, I realize the crafting of this piece was therapeutic. Wow! Writing heals! Yes, writing heals. I now believe this recurring dream of a ghost wedding in the future was a form of grieving. This was grief, old, delayed grief, and thus a protracted hanging on to let go. I had hung on for so long I forgot where I was and what I was doing. When I got present to this, I let it all go. Those old dreams of getting back together somehow with my former lover had become iron chains and anchors. They weren’t liberating at all, those maddening, horny old dreams. I opened my tired, clenched hands and dropped. I fell into freedom. 

Such resolution and liberation may not have occurred, however, without many deep conversations with my friend Edan. They prove a catalyst, I recognize now. In our contemporary real-life waking world, Edan works in psychotherapy and counseling as a highly skilled healer. Recently he’s engaged in deep grief healing group work with others as he struggled to resolve his own issues and to help others resolve theirs. He was the one person with whom I shared the most intimate details of my dream with. Sometimes over and over again across the past five years to his eventual and somewhat concealed exasperation. Yes, I did tell Kristina a little of my dream, and, yes, also Faithlyn, but not much as the dream was more about me and my internal processes and not them. Didn’t want to project upon them. Life is messy, and life goes on for those of us who choose to live regardless of circumstances. Aye, life is messy. Seems to recur a lot, too, our messes; outside of dreams in real-life, too. I’ve still more to clean up. What about you?

 

William Dudley Bass
Friday 18 July 2025
Monday 8 September 2025
Revised 15 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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