The Dream Apparition

The Dream Apparition

I woke from a dream and, like most dreams that carry a certain weight to them, I sat quietly before trying to understand it. Not because I was trying to interpret symbols or pull apart meanings, but because there was something lingering around it that felt larger than the dream itself. It was the atmosphere that stayed with me. A feeling. The kind of feeling that arrives before the mind catches up, before logic arrives.

In the dream, a familiar presence from another chapter of my life appeared—someone I had once built a long life with. What struck me first was the absence of conflict—no arguing. No blame. No courtroom energy. No old scripts replaying themselves. It felt as though all the noise had somehow fallen away, and what remained were simply two people standing somewhere beyond the debris of history.

I remember speaking calmly and saying things I realised I had never fully stopped carrying. I said, “I don’t understand why you did what you did to me.” Not from anger. Not from punishment. More from standing inside the long shadow of consequence and looking back across years of distance.

I said: You put me in such a traumatic position, with many characters and perplexing situations, and all the while you knew I had no support. You knew this would crush my nervous system. I had trusted your word. The level of betrayal was astonishing. I would never have believed this of you. The you I had once known always kept their word.

The court battle stretched across four long years. Years spent inside a system that seemed built to wear people down, to erode their strength until they could no longer stand tall. Somewhere in the midst of that relentless struggle, I was diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly, I was fighting in two directions at once: in my body and in the courtroom.

My nervous system bore a weight I could hardly comprehend. A constant strain that left its imprint on me. CPTSD is painfully real, and for me, medication has never been the answer. My only path forward has been slow, deliberate healing. Enduring, breathing, and choosing not to numb. This is why I miss my horses so deeply. Sharing breath with them was a solace beyond words, a sacred quiet where my heart could mend.

But life stretched me too far. I had to make choices I would wish on no one, surrendering the very beings who fed my spirit because my budget could no longer carry the cost of their care. My horses, my truest friends, had to leave my life. And the ache of that loss still lingers. I feel now, in writing this, that this could be why I kept pushing so hard to restore, not to replace my old life but to keep my heart intact, knowing I could create the foundation I so deeply craved. But I am one person, not a double income and with our world today, perhaps I set my bar way too high. And maybe the faith I originally held so tightly, thinking people would care, was now revealing how much I had misguided myself into believing when my instincts tried to tell me all along. But I kept saying, " Don't be negative, it's just the grief talking, it's funny how hard we are on ourselves when we would not do this to others in grief … well, I would at least hope not.

What I have noticed is that people are curious creatures. Some seem to quietly take pleasure in others' challenges, in watching someone slip. I am not one of them. I have always extended my hand to help, yet I have learned, perhaps painfully, that not everyone means it when they say they care. Still, I carry on, healing in my own quiet way, holding close the love I once shared with those gentle souls who listened without words.

So now the home was gone. And when that happened, I also found that many of the people I thought were friends were gone, or they enjoyed reminding me of who I once was, what I once had, and who I was now.

Funny how life eventually reveals what the real currency was. Proximity.

In the dream, he said very little. He told me he was sad and simply keeping himself occupied. Neither of us spoke about the lives built afterwards. Neither of us went there.

And then suddenly all of it disappeared. No history. No stories. No roles.

Just two people standing there. He held me, and I held him back the way you hold someone when the body still remembers something the mind has spent years trying to release. I remember saying I missed the man I had once known. I remember feeling warmth. Not metaphorical warmth. Actual warmth.

And then the dream shifted.

Suddenly, I was driving, and I could not keep my eyes open. I kept saying to myself, “Wake up.” Open your eyes. Wake up.

The harder I tried, the heavier my eyelids became.

I remember saying in the dream, “I am going to have an accident.” I cannot see the road.

Open your eyes.

Then I woke.

What stayed with me was not grief. Not fear. Not even sadness.

It was an atmosphere.

The feeling was the same as sensing rain before it arrives. You cannot explain it rationally. The pressure changes. The air changes. The light itself feels different somehow. Something shifts before there is evidence of it.

And for the last four or five days, I have felt that same atmosphere moving through my life.

Not dramatically.

Not as some great upheaval.

Just quietly.

Like the weather changing somewhere over the horizon.

Since Uranus moved into Gemini, something has felt different. Not because I am interested in proving prediction or certainty, but because sometimes symbolic language simply gives shape to things we already feel happening beneath the surface. There has been this sense that something is reorganising itself quietly underneath me. And I think what feels different is me.

Lately, I have realised that I have spent much of my life driving myself forward, driving toward something, driving toward someone, and driving toward some future version of myself that I thought might eventually arrive and finally feel settled.

I kept trying. Kept pushing. Kept reaching. Not because I wanted more things. Not because I was chasing ambition in the usual sense.

I think I was trying to become more than enough because I did not understand my value. I hadn't been seen, so I kept thinking I wasn’t enough. So I kept seeking to become more worthy. More wanted. More valued.

As though somewhere inside me there lived a belief that if I could finally become enough, then perhaps I would no longer feel the thing I had spent my entire life trying to outrun. Feeling unwanted.

I think that feeling arrived long before I had language for it, long before relationships, careers, communities or success. I think it arrived before memory itself, somewhere in the quiet architecture of being born into circumstances where I was never fully expected and never fully chosen.

Whether that is entirely true no longer feels like the point.

Because true or not, I shaped a life around avoiding that feeling.

I became someone who tried hard. Someone who wanted to leave things better than I found them. Someone who worked harder, who didn’t stop, who loved deeply, overextended, overgave and kept moving.

I kept ticking boxes. Even the boxes that never really fit me. I kept trying to belong. Then life eventually arrived with its own plans.

A chapter came that unravelled almost everything familiar to me. A chapter that brought cancer, legal warfare, financial devastation and the strange grief of watching a carefully built life melt like ice cream on hot pavement.

Not slowly.

Not poetically.

Just gone.

And I remember feeling perplexed by it all because I thought I had done everything correctly.

I thought I had followed the formula. I thought I had tried hard enough. I thought effort guaranteed something. So how had I ended up here?

Afterwards, I found myself searching. I turned back toward spiritual communities, healing spaces, astrology, therapies, yoga and places promising meaning. Not because spirituality was foreign to me. It had always been woven through my life.

But I found myself surprised.

Because so much of it felt like the same world wearing different clothes.

Business says scale more.

Coaching says shine brighter.

Manifesting says align more.

Spirituality says rise higher.

People need your gifts. People are waiting for your wisdom. You are here to help. You are here to teach. Different language. Same architecture. You must become more. And I think perhaps that was the moment I started opening my eyes.

Because I suddenly realised I had spent years walking in circles.

Different roads. Different communities. Different identities. Same hunger.

I kept thinking I was moving forward, but perhaps I was simply driving toward some future version of myself who would finally feel enough once I arrived.

And here is what I have been sitting with since the dream.

I wonder why, after everything, I pushed so hard to start again. I spent a fortune on websites, marketing, writing a book, rebuilding, and trying to be seen. I kept shapeshifting into what I thought people needed me to be, contorting myself to retain proximity, to stay relevant, to remain in the room.

And for what? Because what I can see now is that no one was particularly interested. Silently watching, though not openly showing up.

Not because I was invisible. But because people were feeding their own hunger. And you can throw chips to seagulls endlessly. They will circle and cry and return. Not because seagulls are cruel. Because hunger behaves like hunger, it has no finish line.

I was feeding hungry ghosts while quietly starving myself.

I had an entire address book once. Now I have one friend and one daughter. And what strikes me is not grief about that. It is the strange clarity of it—the peculiar simplicity of it all.

Because when I look back at the crowd, I no longer see betrayal. I see hunger.

I see people feeding their own longing while I quietly fed mine.

And perhaps I was doing the same thing they were. Throwing chips into the air, hoping something would finally circle back and choose me.

Because when I look back now, I can see that much of it was proximity dressed as association. People who needed what I offered, what I knew, what I could provide, what I reflected back to them. And when I changed, when I stopped performing and started withdrawing into my own seeing. I dug deep I found a new level of truth within myself. 

It was hard to admit, and I honestly pushed against it, but I had lost the taste to partake after years of pushing and showing up. Almost like the quote, the more you know, the less you want to say… Then I realised my heart had stopped pumping the desire into my veins. Maybe that's why it seemed things were never going to work out. I was no longer speaking a language anyone could hear; the values I stand for are no longer part of our new world. And perhaps my own heart and soul knew this all along, and were saying it’s time to put down the batten. This is your moment to stop. To change course entirely. Because the chips have run out. And now I find myself asking a question I cannot quite let go of.

If I had been the woman I am now back then, would I have had to experience what I experienced? I sit beside that question without trying to answer it quickly.

Because I think the woman I am now could only exist because she walked through the fire she would have spared herself from. Not because suffering is noble. Not because devastation is destiny. But because the person who can now see the architecture, who can recognise proximity and performance and the hungry ghost and the circus of becoming, could only see all of that because she was once entirely inside it. I don't feel sadness; I feel silly because I should have listened to my own wisdom once again and put all the tools down a long time ago, and saved myself the stress of striving.

The earlier version of me could not yet see, or maybe did not want to see, that I had reached an ending that was not going to be anything that it had been before. But old me well, she was still trying to open her eyes.

Which brings me back to the dream.

Open your eyes.

Open your eyes.

Open your eyes.

What is interesting is that no matter how hard I tried inside the dream, I could not force sight. The harder I pushed, the heavier my eyelids became. I kept saying: I am going to have an accident. I cannot see the road.

And then I woke. Not because I worked harder. Not because I pushed more. I woke up because waking finally arrived.

I then found myself thinking about an old friend. His name was Robert Swanson. It was New Year’s Eve, 1981, and something about that day was unusual, though none of us understood it at the time. Robert spent the day visiting almost everyone he knew in our town, going from friend to friend and sitting with each of them. Saying happy New Year personally, face to face, as though each visit mattered in a way that visits did not usually matter.

That night, on New Year’s Day, he was in a car accident. He was a passenger. He was only twenty-one years old.

He died.

I have thought about Robert many times over the years. Whether his soul somehow knew. Whether something in him understood that this was the last day, and moved him, quietly and without alarm, to say goodbye to everyone he loved without calling it goodbye.

There was something beautiful in it. And something that has never fully left me.

I raise it now not from morbidity but because what I have been feeling lately carries a similar quality.

A kind of life-review consciousness. Standing on a hill and looking back over the whole landscape. Seeing the invisible architecture that had been carrying everything all along. Seeing the patterns. The circles. The hunger. The driving.

A life can end before a body does.

Roles end. Strategies end. Identities end. Ways of surviving end.

And sometimes there is a strange feeling of standing between worlds. Not because you are leaving life. Because a version of you is leaving. A way of being that served its purpose and is now complete.

And maybe that is the deeper meaning of the dream.

Not a warning.

A threshold.

Because I keep returning to this: all the cost of the websites, the marketing, the silence in return, all the rebuilding, all the expense, energy and effort poured into writing my book, all the pushing, all the trying that seemed to go nowhere externally. No great audience arrived. No doors opened the way I imagined they would. And for a long time, I read that as failure.

But I wonder now whether I was not failing to build something impressive in the eyes of others.

I wonder whether I was building the eyes I have now.

And lately, I keep returning to an image in my mind of an old dusty horse whisperer standing beside a horse.

Not the polished version sold through books and social media. Not the charismatic teacher beneath spotlights. Not the superstar flashy cowboy everyone wants to know.

Just an old man standing in the dust.

No audience.

No performance.

No proving.

He is no longer interested in the fireworks because once upon a time, he was inside the show himself. He knew the striving. He knew the wanting. He knew what it meant to keep moving even when the road was no longer visible.

But life eventually showed him the full spectrum. The rise and the fall. The gaining and the losing. The performance and what remained after the curtain dropped. And somewhere inside that journey, life gave him something. Not transcendence. Not superiority. Just the ability to step outside the game and finally see it clearly. Because perhaps real wisdom is not escaping the game.

Perhaps wisdom is standing beside it and choosing consciously what deserves your life force. And maybe the cosmic joke is on me. Because I forced myself to follow the map, to keep up, and now life is quietly saying: you had it right the first time. You forgot to back yourself. To trust yourself. To let others think whatever they want, without spending your life force trying to convince them otherwise. 

But I had been born into a home where love and safety had to be earned. Where you had to prove your worth just to deserve to belong. The truth is, I was beaten down over many years as a child until I eventually left. Which I accepted long ago, but have noticed how these sneaky energies resurface deep from the psyche. Especially now under all these current influences.

So the young and wounded part of me was determined to prove she was worthy. That she could create and deliver. That she was ingenious. That she could solve problems for others. That she cared. That she never wanted anyone to feel the way she had felt. And most importantly, that she was worth loving.

It is all so interesting seeing it now that I finally have my eyes open wide. Because I see it all so differently. I realise I was always craving something quieter. I just could not let myself rest in that.

Simple things.

Wearing boots, avoiding pointy heels, and never worrying about the dust beneath them. Having a horse breathing beside you. Waking to a slower morning. Sitting with the mountains as they awaken at sunrise.

A cup of tea before anyone else wakes. The beautiful silence that does not need filling. No concern for who thinks what. Following my heart’s integrity and expression, even if no one sees or cares.

Watching the mountains wake up to sunrise.

The warmth of a genuine smile.

The strange relief of stepping outside the noise and realising the noise was never what you wanted. You chased it because that is what the world had programmed you to do. You had to, in order to belong, to be seen as worthy.

This awareness now brings with it a tenderness. Realising I was enough even before the show ever started. It took so long to get here. But I got here on my own esteem—no cheer squad. No encouragement. No family group cheer.

I crossed that line. And now I will not perform for any trophy again. Trophies disappear, collect dust and can be stolen in a blink. My only remorse is why I took so long to see.

And maybe that is why I have found myself thinking about Robert again. Thinking about the strange tenderness of someone moving through a day without knowing it is a farewell. Or perhaps knowing it in some wordless place and following it anyway.

And maybe that is why his story has stayed with me all these years. I find myself wondering whether I have been doing something similar, whether I have spent these last years saying goodbye without knowing I was saying goodbye.

Goodbye to versions of myself.

Goodbye to ways of surviving.

Goodbye to striving.

Goodbye to hunger.

Goodbye to all the driving.

And lately I have wondered whether what I am feeling carries a similar quality.

Not an ending. Not death. Not leaving. Something quieter than that. The feeling of standing at the edge of one life while another waits just beyond the horizon. Not becoming someone new. Just arriving at who I was before all the driving and striving began.

I keep returning to one thought. I wonder whether I was not failing all those years by not building something that would look impressive. I wonder whether I was building the eyes I have now.

Because the dream kept saying:

Open your eyes.

Open your eyes.

Open your eyes.

And perhaps that was the apparition all along.

Not him. Not the past. Sight.

And perhaps that is where I find myself now. Not arriving at certainty. Not arriving at answers. Just arriving at a place where my hands are no longer gripping the wheel so tightly. Hands off the wheel. And whatever happens from here, happens. Not because it no longer matters. Because I no longer believe I can force the road.

And perhaps the rain on the horizon reminds me that I have learned, slowly and at great cost, to trust what I feel before I can see it.

That is not a small thing. That may be everything.

Delahrose Roobie Myer