Dream: My Alzheimer’s Dad explains Alzheimer’s

            On March 11, 2014, my dad passed away, after battling Alzheimer’s since the turn of the millennium.  He came to me in a dream a couple of weeks ago, early into the morning of Memorial Day.  Although he had died not in war, but battling Alzheimer’s, when I started to record the dream into my journal, I was struck by how fitting it was that Dad had chosen Memorial day as the morning to come to me in a dream.  

Biographical background: Dad was a computer engineer with a brilliant mind.  His mathematical genius, along with that of a colleague, helped set an early stage for the movement from large computers into PCs, then laptops, small devices, and cell phones.  Today, Dad’s algorithms are no longer widely used, but they set a stage for where we are today.  You could liken them to Direct Current (DC) in contrast to today’s algorithms that would be like Alternating Current (AC).  He wrote two books, had 18 patents, gets over 2000 hits on Google, and his colleague of the algorithms, who was not struck with Alzheimer’s and has kept innovating, has a Wikipedia page.  Known for his mind, having witnessed his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s, Dad was terrified of the disease.  He denied it, fought it, angrily reacted, and, depending upon one’s interpretation of its onset, painfully battled it for 12-15 years.

            The dream, as recorded into my journal:

            In the dream, Dad expressed gratitude for the experience of Alzheimer’s.  He said, “Alzheimer’s is not what your doctors think it is.”  He called it not a “disease,” but an “experience” that some souls choose in order to discover another realm.  He said his soul is very Earth grounded in the material, empirical realm, and that any realm apart from this one has terrified him, but his soul longed to discover it.  He said when an Alzheimer’s patient is distant, he has walked into another realm.  When he appears lucid and present, he has walked back into the Earth realm.  “When you [caregivers] see your loved one really with you, it’s because he’s well established in the Earth realm at that time.”  Then he said, “Sometimes, the person will enter the other realm and start following where that other realm is leading him, and he’ll go out walking in that other realm.”  When he said that, I saw him walking and not seeing the physical Earth reality, but what appeared in the other realm, which, in my dream, was shown like a film editing overlay over the Earth realm.  Then he said, “And then he’ll switch into the Earth realm and wonder, ‘where am I?’”

            He said the other realm terrified him, not because it was bad, but because it was unfamiliar.  He said some people with Alzheimer’s discover how nice the other realm is and like it there, and I thought of my Aunt Carolyn, who my cousin said was happy, grateful, often speaking of her husband (who had already passed), and expressing awe.  Then Dad said that other people are terrified of the other realm, like he was.  He resisted the other realm and tried very hard to keep it away from him.

            Then he said, “When the person returns to the Earth realm from the other realm, he wants to re-establish himself back into the Earth realm, and the best way to do this is to repeat what he was doing or saying at the time of he left it.  So he’ll repeat what he had said to get himself back.”

            He said he was grateful for what he had learned by discovering another realm, and he is no longer afraid of these other realms, but welcomes them.

            Wow, Dad. Thank you.  Wow.  I love you!

I also send love to all who are battling this “experience” and to all who love and care for one who is.  

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