Post 34: Was This What the Dream Meant?

I attended the interview in January 2019.

Then I waited.

By that stage, waiting had become familiar to me.

I had waited for opportunities. I had waited for funding. I had waited for different stages of the PhD journey to unfold. Now I was waiting again.

Then the breakthrough came.

I was offered the permanent position.

In March 2019, I left George and started my first permanent job in Polokwane.

After years of studying, internships, temporary work, financial uncertainty and applications, I finally had permanent employment.

Naturally, my mind returned to the dream.

“Your father says you must not worry. Everything will be alright.”

Was this what the message had meant?

Looking backwards, it would be very easy for me to say yes.

But can I honestly know that?

The dream never said:

You are going to get permanent employment.

It never mentioned Polokwane.

It never mentioned March 2019.

In fact, the message was not even addressed directly to me.

The traditional healer in the dream had told my grandmother:

“Your father says you must not worry.”

Perhaps I was only the messenger.

Perhaps what subsequently happened in my own life had nothing to do with the message at all.

That possibility has to remain open.

But there is something about the experience that I still struggle to explain.

The permanent employment came afterwards.

The description of my great-grandfather came before.

I had never met him. He had died before I was born.

Yet after the dream, before any of these later events occurred, I called my grandmother from George and asked her about her father.

Was he tall?

Was he slender?

Was he a clean man who dressed well?

Did he have that particular green jacket?

She recognised the description.

That telephone conversation happened before I knew what would happen with my employment.

It happened before I submitted my final PhD thesis for external examination.

It happened before I left George believing that my contract had ended.

It happened before I was unexpectedly called back.

And it happened before the invitation for a permanent position arrived on my actual birthday.

That distinction matters to me.

If something good had happened first and I later remembered a vague dream and attached meaning to it, retrospective interpretation would provide a fairly straightforward explanation.

But the dream was important enough for me to call my grandmother when I had it.

The message existed before the outcome.

The question existed before the outcome.

Neither my grandmother nor I knew what was supposed to become alright.

Then, over the following months, several things that had been uncertain began to resolve.

The final PhD thesis was submitted for external examination.

The employment contract that I thought had ended was unexpectedly extended.

Before that extension was even properly formalised, another opportunity opened.

Then permanent employment followed.

So was this what the dream meant?

I still cannot say.

Perhaps I had heard something about my great-grandfather earlier in life and forgotten where I had heard it.

Perhaps information stored somewhere in my memory later appeared in the dream.

Perhaps the dream and the events that followed were completely unrelated.

Perhaps I am connecting them because I now know how the story ended.

Those possibilities cannot simply be dismissed.

But neither can I honestly say that I know that one of them must be the explanation.

And perhaps this is where I have to separate two questions.

What happened?

That I can describe.

Why did it happen that way?

That is much harder.

I cannot prove that my great-grandfather communicated through my dream.

But neither can I prove that he did not.

The permanent job did not settle that question.

If anything, it gave me another reason to keep asking it.

Months earlier, during a period of uncertainty, there had been a simple message:

“Everything will be alright.”

Months later, several of the things that had been uncertain were beginning to become alright.

Whether those two facts are connected is something I still cannot claim to know.

Join the conversation

When something meaningful happens before an outcome, how do we distinguish coincidence from a connection we simply do not understand?