24 Aug 2025
Dream
Dreamed of a family that I used to be neighbors with and then a dream of being a teenage girl being chased by her father, and she survives the chase and lands in arms of new friends.
First dream I was observing this family closely that had a Chinese father and a white American mother. They were based on a family I grew up with in my neighborhood. The father was not really involved in the three daughters’ lives and was very strange a d particular and how he wanted things to look and how he wanted the house to run. He was extremely particular yet not actually involved in the daughter’s lives and abandoned the family and only showed up later randomly and had all these opinions and desires. So there was a lot of resentment from the daughters towards the father because he didn’t really know them or care about them or love them, but had all of these expectations about their behavior and the house. The family was sometimes composed of three daughters and then another time composed of two daughters and one son and the father initially wanted three daughters so they had a daughter and then they had a second daughter and then they had a son, and apparently he left the family or was upset because it wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted those three daughters. So he was trying to control the composition of the family, which is crazy and not possible, nobody can do that. For a part of this dream, I was just observing this family and talking to my sister Ruby and sometimes my sister Marley, and sometimes I was talking to the wife and the family. Ruby told me that she asked the wife what their wedding day was like. And she seemed very ambivalent about her wedding day. I immediately said oh this man was saying he wanted certain things, but actually wanted something else. That kind of summarizes the whole family dynamic. He seemed to want this family on paper or at least theoretically but then when the family was actually real and there for him, he was extremely absent, both physically and emotionally and ultimately abandoned the family.
I remember looking at this family’s photos. I saw photos of him and I also witnessed a bit of their wedding day and they were very ill matched, this couple. And the daughters that they had were very upset with the marriage once they became children. There was one part where the marriage was so bad and communication in the home was so poor that they set up these large Chinese bells that were hooked up to other rooms in the house so they could ring a bell in order to get the attention of somebody who was elsewhere in the house. And I guess it had been the fathers idea to put in these bells and I witnessed the three daughters be in the kitchen and they’re ringing a bell and also banging mallets just up and down vertically, a very simple pattern. They’re banging mallets on the counter and the idea was that I was supposed to get the father‘s attention and then he would come to the room and respond to them. They did it for quite a while and he didn’t show up or respond.
He was extremely severe and traditional in his beliefs, and his expectations. The home looked like a traditional wealthy Chinese home. The daughters were sad that they didn’t know their grandparents. They didn’t know the father‘s parents, they had never met them and especially wondered about the father’s mother. At one point, the father did show up for the daughters and the daughters were in a big courtyard, like the courtyard of a traditional large Chinese home with a lot of dark stone. And the daughters were to perform something for him, but one or two of them had a breakdown and were screaming and crying about why he was never there and why he didn’t respond to them and why he was absent and just crying about everything that he had done to their family and the ways that he had made them feel. So this entire sad story about his family with three children being dysfunctional and the father being absent emotionally and physically, it’s all a vector for growing up in my family where my father was emotionally unavailable And quite rigid and at times uncaring towards usus daughters daughters. Basically, I always questioned if the life that he built with us was what he really wanted and what his care would look like or feel like because I didn’t feel like he cared about us in the ways that we really wanted and needed from him, he did care about us in the ways that he could, but it was limited and meant that there was a lot of lack especially emotionally.
The second part of the dream was more intense. It was about a teenage girl who was running from her father. Her father wore a black shirt and military style black cargo pants and boots and he had a big gun and she was running for a lot of the dream from his gun and his desire to shoot her. He looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger or a big action movie villain in dark sunglasses. Their fight began in a residential alley and it was really sunny outside and beautiful and the alley looked a little bit like an alley that could be in the neighborhood I grew up in. It wasn’t the alley that I grew up with that was behind my house, but just in the neighborhood. The teenage daughter sung a few lines of a song about how she wished that her father knew her middle name and the meaning was that she wished that he had been involved in her life and actually knew real things about her because he didn’t, and he felt angry that she was saying these things even though they were true. So she spent a lot of time running and hiding in different bushes and trees. She hid behind a tree trunk in my family‘s backyard for a time and her father just kept trying to catch her and shoot her. Her father transformed into a couple different men sometimes but mostly he stayed as this Arnold Schwarzenegger looking person. There was some intensity and fear when he would almost catch her so there was some adrenaline, but I was also watching this with some remove because I wasn’t the daughter and I trusted that she would find her way out of this and she survive. Eventually, she decides to hide in a trashcan in the alley. There’s all these big dumpsters for trash and recycling so she hides in one of those and I think that is a good hiding spot if she gets in there quickly and the lid shuts without him noticing. He’ll think that she’s still running around the street and hiding behind bushes when actually she’s in the alley in a trashcan. Eventually, the chase becomes so intense she is running across traffic and dodging cars. The day is really sunny and beautiful and she does this and she times her run across the street so she doesn’t get hit by cars. She gets to a grassy area makes a left turn and is still running and has to jump over a moving train. All the while the father is chasing her and she jumps over the fast moving train and lands. He tries to do the same thing and he gets hit by the train and there’s just a moment of him being hit spinning, bleeding, and he died and I remember her relief as she had escaped him. Then she was for a while flying in this helicopter, she was lying down inside the helicopter and it was unmanned, and the helicopter wasn’t moving very quickly. It was stalled actually, and the propellers weren’t moving at all. She was just free floating on the wind. And she appeared in the heart of a city and she saw these people sitting on rooftops at a restaurant eating and chatting, they glimpsed her and she hoped that they react or do something because she wasn’t in control of this freefall that was Kind of gentle and slow, but it still a freefall and she didn’t know where she was going. Eventually, she leapt or fell out and she landed in the arms of this friendly girl who looked like a track runner, a young woman. She looked like the kind of girl I could’ve gone to school with, like she looks like a high school or college athlete. She was telling this girl as she was falling I’m gonna land in your arms, like open your arms can I land with you? And this girl is like of course, and just opened her arms and caught the falling girl, and the girl was kind of me. She caught me. And I remember being aware of how easily this girl caught me and she didn’t even know me and I remember touching her arms very affectionately and looking at her track outfit shorts and T-shirt and just being glad and so relieved that somebody had caught me. She was with her track team. They were walking somewhere and they were kinda walking slowly and pausing where they were and this other girl comes up, who has a blonde braid, again these all look like the track team from my high school or college. This girl comes up and she says he really quickly can I show you my butt hole and I laugh and the other girl laughs and she was like yeah sure OK, why though? And everybody’s just laughing. She wanted I guess to see how dark her butt hole was or something, but it was really funny and it was just all these athletes laughing about this and we kept going on our way and it was around that time I woke up.
Overall, it was a very powerful dream. It was intense, but I had this level of remove that made me feel resilient and capable in the face of the dream because the things I was seeing and sometimes feeling were intense, but the weather was always sunny. The dream was visually beautiful, and especially when I landed in the arms of this girl, as she was walking with her team, and the team was making jokes and all the friendship and camaraderie. I survived everything and felt strong and capable throughout the dream and happy.
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