My dear mother, Eunice Blanchard Poethig died on Palm Sunday, March 25 2018 at 7:00pm.  My youngest sister, Erika, and I were with her.  A Filipina nurse named Vida (yes) had arrived to take her "vitals."  When Vida couldn't get a pulse, she shifted the medical equipment. Then she stopped, peered, whispered, "she's not breathing."  Mom had been actively dying.  But this, I had not expected. Eunice was. Then she was not. 

The afterwards is dream-like. Tears, calls to siblings, dad on his way down from his Independent Living apartment.  We dressed our mother in clothes that Johanna had selected, laid her out on the hospital bed she'd kept trying to escape. Dad sat beside her, head bowed, and held her hand. The nurses arrived to mark her departure. They called hospice, who contacted the Illinois Cremation Society. These are the protocols of death. My mother's body stayed warm, but turned a kind of caramel white. Her death grimace softened.  Joy (yes) her minister, arrived to help us pray, and sing, and say a bodily goodbye. I climbed onto the hospital bed to lie beside my mother's body for the last time. Joy, bless her, finally went home. A cheerful hospice nurse arrived. The next shift's caregivers paid their respects. When Precious, a Nigerian caregiver on "graveyard" shift, learned Eunice had died, she gave a great shout of grief that caught up all the hidden sorrow in that place -- mothers sick or dead in faraway places (West Africa, Asia, Latin America) and souls on the Memory floor unable to let go. 

Finally, inevitably, the Cremation Society man wheeled in a gurney which held a velvet casing. A nurse helped him shift mom's body onto the gurney. With great care, he zipped up the case, leaving her face for last.  It was almost midnight.  

There were so many tasks after that Monday breakfast -- social security calls, her death certificates, her closest ally Anita and Beatris (above)  doing the work of closure: emptying out her room, redistributing her goods to Chicago's Brown Elephant, determining the memorial.  I remember little details, that Anita ordered Lebanese sandwiches for lunch.  Erika organized a "Presbyterian shiva," that brought an overflow of well wishers to dad's apartment. I hid in the back room. Easter Sunday we sat in the Lakeview church celebrating a resurrection thick with grief. Grief is exhausting.  I returned to California to continue teaching the semester. While others had an inkling of her presence, I couldn't feel Eunice, so mired in the entanglement of her dementia and excruciating physicality of her last months alive.

I've had several years of dream drought.  She arrived last week.

In the dream we siblings are clearing various rooms, selecting, packing, giving away. (We have also closed down dad's Independent Living apartment in Chicago and settled him near Scott in Philadelphia, and this dream closing felt a little like that.) I am lying in bed in last the room. Mother comes in and stands at the left corner of the bed. She is tall, younger, placid.  Had she been coming down the hall? I'm surprised, and say, "mom, I didn't know you were here!"  She silent, suddenly at the right corner of the bed, whisking her arm briskly, back and forth.  I wake.

When I am ready to leave, will she come for me like that: softly, wordless, gesturing, "I am not like this anymore"?

The wind chimes clatter;
You look up.
When a sudden and strange light
breaks from behind your eyes,
you begin to talk,
and pick at the chip in your coffee cup
til you realize, surprised, that
your lover's voice is violet.

When snared like a lynx,
you wrench free,
gasp like a fish thrown back
weeping silently
and unashamed
while her breathing beside you
reminds you what is warm and plain.

You can return,
but by another way
to our place in the Laniakea,
to the space
where, deep
as a deep sown seed
your life unfurls
while you turn, restless
as the dark earth stirs
under the furrow:
a sweet bright green.

Dream themes threading through these weeks.
Thurs, Feb 5 Chicago, 2009, visiting the parents in Hyde Park
I plucked Inana’s songs, Sumerian goddess from mom's shelf. After I read it, a sleepless hypnagogic  night in Hyde Park Condos, Apt 614. On-again-off-again half-dreams, in the midst of which I have a sense of celestial power. Stars appear in black immense cosmic space. A creature appears: Milagros, a small  figure in the midst of dark, a little like Mary Poppins.  She has a starry heaven metallic hat --I can draw it. Feels like pink, light circuitry. I wake and muse. Milagros? What does that mean?
 
That day, on my flight back to California, the Chicago-Oakland is cancelled in Denver.  I think of Milagros when my chest is anxious and tight, and feel a distinct warmth. It really surprises me. So I talk to her when I’m afraid I’m going to have to go into SFO at 11pm. Customer Service finds a formerly non-existent seat on a United flight into Oakland. Milagros my practical angel. Thank you!  Arrived in Oakland and got to Jo and Chris by 9pm without my luggage.

Friday, Feb 6 in Oakland, Johanna's TV room
Dream: Feast of nuns (Hebrew not Catholic)

I'm preparing an important dish to share with people who, in turn, will teach large classes. It's flat, like quiche, with special ingredients. Unusual, rare, maybe magical.  We're in an old stone house, as in Europe (I don't usually dream of European landscapes). Five people arrive together instead of their designated times. I'd scheduled everyone too close.

Delfina is one of the 5. She says "I looked it up" and shows a white piece of paper. At the top is a line of Hebrew nuns, vavs and zayns. (I was learning the Hebrew letters in Chicago).  I can't write them here, but like this (don't know how many in the line). I noticed that the first was a nun and was violet.
  111111111
 
 Yes! These are the symbols for the ingredients in the order to be added.  It was simpler than all the elaborate directions in my recipe. I wasn't certain we were going to use it because there was so much going on.
But the image kept appearing - 1111111
 
Feb 7 on way back to Watsonville
Get home in the rain, go off at Exit Rio del Mar to park. I write in the car in the rain. Thinking of nephew Sammy with aspbergers as a song comes on the radio about loving. I worry that Sam might have a hard time finding a sweetheart. Overwhelmed,  I pull off the hiway to cry, weeping on the steering wheel. God please help him.  Then, out of the blue,  sense of Milagros, a quick bright image of a fairy who arrives after the curse, to give the saving last blessing. It’s a clear feeling, full of grace and love.  The prayer was answered even as I prayed it. Sammy will be OK.

Feb 9 Home in Watsonville
Dream: Horse heaven, Jaguar Heaven
DREAM 1:
I'm on a motorbike-bicycle to get a Horse Heaven/Latitude Tee shirt.  The brown boy is peddling fast. It's near closing time. Outside the market, men (Filipino?) are hanging around, playing cards, drinking coffee. They look up. To a particular man, the boy asks, “Lo-o?” which I understand as ‘closed’?  (but in Khmer it means beautiful.) The man nods, gestures to go back in. He’s in charge. “Sa likod,” I ask? I think in the dream that we are speaking Tagalog.  We go down into a gloomy textile open market. Most stalls are closed in the low light.  Feels deserted. On the way, I take out $20: two crisp $10 (round trip) and one $5 for a tip.  I can’t decide. If I give it to him now will he still take me back?
We get to the back stall of textiles that is still open. There a room in the back with tall shelves filled with merchandise. There’s still time. The shopkeeper, the guardian, has what we want on the table in front. But then we move back to where there are three really smart people, self-confidently aware of their star power. The line is full now.

I wake & Google "horse latitude": Either of two subtropical atmospheric high-pressure belts that encircle the Earth around latitudes 30°–35° N and 30°–35° S and that generate light winds and clear skies. Because they contain dry, subsiding air, they produce arid climates in the areas below them (i.e. the Sahara). The Southern Hemisphere, which has more water area than the Northern, has the more continuous belt of subsiding air. The belts contain several separate high-pressure centres and shift a few degrees away from the equator in summer.
 
DREAM 2: Woman in star hat: “I saved it for you.”
In a lecture hall, a woman is talking from the dais. I have a seat up near the front to show I’m interested and will do well. But I'm sharing that single seat with a short woman in a yellow pant suit. When I get up to give her the seat – its not worth it to sit this way – she falls backward on her head.  I walk down the wide middle aisle, back to the seat I first had, but now it’s taken.  There is nowhere to sit. The lecture hall is now filled.  I don’t care if I’m walking in full view, I’m looking for a seat.  Then, on the right, a woman in a hat with a star on it gestures that she has a seat for me. It’s in the back.  When I get over to her, she says to me conspiratorially, “I saved it for you.”
Wake up. Draw this:
 
     x
------- -------
-------  -x----- - my first seat
-------  ------
-------  ------
 -------  -------
-------- xxxxxx - lots of people sitting, no room
--------- --------
----xx--- -------  - where we sit

When I do a dream reflection, I realize that the woman in the hat is Milagros.

 "Ah, the emotions of supernatural beings reflect the meaning of human existence!"
Jenshi chuan, T'ang folktale

Jesse, the buddhist santa cruz therapist, listens and reflects. She helps to pan for gold.  All the nuggets say: time to go.  Time from the administration dungeon, a profession I no longer fathom, the classroom, students I love. Time to seek integration. Why, why do I linger?  She listens. At the end of our last session, she is quite still. She leans back, then forward. She says, "do not become the fox."  I nod and shift on the soft couch, not quite comprehending. The room is warm and dark. I check the lithograph of birds above her head. 

I imagine Kitsune no Yomeiri, the eerie fox wedding in Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurasawa's film Dreams. No, not that fox. She means the wild fox, the fox of fools.  The monk who becomes a wild fox for 500 lifetimes because he mistakes the question of cause and effect.  I don't know this fox, or how to follow the warning: Take Notice. I google wild fox koan and find Japanese Zen master Dōgen Zenji's wild fox koan.

What are the multiple moral and contradictory messages of this koan? Why a fox? Why not to become a fox?

There are countless Ch'an/Zen medieval commentaries on the wild fox koan. Dogen offers several treatises on Hyakujo and the Wild Fox. He first gives a conventional interpretation of the koan, but towards the end of his life, he shifts towards a more imaginative and supernatural interpretation. Why did Dogen change his tune? 

I go to Hein (1999) to understand these fox-persons in the koan.  In Japanese lore, foxes are demonic (the nine-tailed fox) and shape-shifting tricksters. One can be possessed by the fox. They populate folklore and popular texts. (Bathgate 2004), so there actually is a connection between my fox wedding and jesse's wild fox.  Hein reviews the sermon of Chinese abbot Pai-chang Huai-hai.  In this sermon, the non-human monk confesses to fei-jen, the term for spirit possession in East Asian folklore, indicative of the six realms of transmigration. The fox/monk is liberated by the "turning word" of the abbot who responds that even the enlightened must submit to causation. Now liberated, his fox corpse is found on the temple grounds and he is given a monk's funeral at the abbot's instruction. The fox, Hein offers, is a door between realms, both philosophical and folkloric. In this first rendition, Hein says that the koan might be less about metaphysics of causality, as it seems to be, but rather about supernaturalism and ritualism. This is about the fox-monk funeral that the abbot conducts.  You know already that I follow Dogen on this, from a formal reflection on causation to an interest on metamophosis and ritual action.

And why does Pai-chang receive a blow from his student after successfully cremating the old monk? The first of a Zen ritual of insubordination. A wake up?

Was jesse boxing my ears? Am I already a fox? Have I been a fox for these many years, possessed by the mistake of causation?  In Turning Word, James Ishmael Ford reminds us,  We are what we do.   Reflecting as a UU/Buddhist minister on this koan, he says, "whatever we are, unless we notice and take corrective action, we just become more of it."  

Shift, regret, act.  Now.
-----
References
Bathgate, Michael, The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities, Routledge, 2004
Heine, Steven, Putting The ``Fox'' Back in The ``Wild Fox Kōan'': The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious Elements in The Ch'an/Zen Kōan Tradition, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies Vol. 56, No. 2 (Dec., 1996), pp. 257-317 
__________  Shifting Shape, Shaping Text: Philosophy and Folklore in the Fox Kōan, University of Hawaii Press, 1999.

,Hummingbird hassles eagle.

 Oakland in the 1990s, I am sweating out my dissertation on a computer that unravels each day's work.  Some secret worm has burrowed in my hard drive. It's a dreadful curse,  like writing on quicksand. I type for eight hours, and the next day either nothing is saved, or some, or sometimes it sticks. But how do I know? Like Penelope secretly unraveling her day's weaving each night.  Will this misery ever end?  

I walk down to the Oakland Catholic cemetery, a mile from our house.  Victoria and I go regularly.  It's a blistery blue California day. Grave stones stand upright on the bright grass. The divine wanders among the dead; humans leave you to yourself.  I'm hiccuping with tears. It's nearly seven years. Am I going to get through this? Please, give me a sign.  

And YHWH, in a good mood, offers a Gideon moment: Test me.  Now, I like the Gideon story in Judges 6.  Gideon is no respecter of persons. The angel catches him threshing wheat secretly in a wine press so that the Midianites would not see him. The angel's there to recruit him for a manly job: take down the Midianites. Gideon declines.  "Pardon me, but we didn't make this problem."  But then he relent (it is God, after all). After a series of God-tests for Gideon, God gives Gideon the chance to test God. So Gideon asks for  wet wool on dry ground (done) and wet ground and dry wool (easy).  Gideon has to complete his impossible task, which YHWH says is a breeze, like a little league playing the Kansas City Royals (world series tonight).  Gideon wins. 

But I'm not thinking of all that when I say, "If things will be OK,  I want to see an eagle and a hummingbird together."  After that big declaration, I look around sheepishly and think: this is the fairytale of three wishes. You always f*ck up.  Which, in a nicer way, is what my mother says when she hears this story later: Don't test God. And she shoots me a strong look that I interpret as, How did I raise this one?

The good news is that my Gideon moment stops my tearful petition.  It's dusk. As the light turns rosen,  a conference of birds rise up in the tangled bushes that border the cemetery.  They twitter in gorgeous chaotic harmony. It's enough, I think, this bird anthem;  it's  answer enough. And up from the memory, I hear, first one line, then another, of a song I composed in my evangelical Minnesota days. A Malcolm Solbakken hymn Kari would love. I sing it to myself, surprised, but glad to remember it.
"Woke up drowsy this morning.
The sun was playing on my sheets,
she was elated with her light.
I breathed a psalm to the morning.
And as I closed the book,
the birds outside my window harmonized.

We've got a long way to climb
We can't avoid the winter storms
and intimately comes the night
but deeper still the greening
the earth gives birth before our eyes.

Woke up bright from my dreaming.
Somebody called me to my feet
and I was standing in the light.
A stranger stood before me and
as he smiled I noticed something familiar in his eyes.

He said, sister, do you see me,
he said Kathryn, do you know me
he asked Kerry, do you love me?
and I cried: Lord!

He said, we've got a long way to climb
but I will walk with you
Together we will make the narrow wide
and as I love you love each other
I've conquered death so enter life..
--------------------
I sing it to myself as I walk home for supper with Victoria, and to bed.  Waking the next morning,  I remember the last stanza:
Around the world people are waking
some on their mats, some on the streets
and some are waking in their cells
Lord I pray this dawn now breaking
will break into the hearts and minds of those
who keep this darkness.

We've got a long way to climb...

Then I looked out our window and am astonished. A wild band of hummingbirds are whizzing through the garden.  Never have we seen this.  All morning, they buzz the air.  As I sit down to my computer, one flies up and peers at me through the window.  I get it!  I see it! 

Years later, at the Wisconsin lake, the bald eagle sits in the high branch of a white pine facing our island,  I kayak out to get closer and disturb a hummingbird nest set in the dark of the lower trunk.  They buzz out to shoo me away. 
For years, I called this a miracle.  Now, I wonder about the Gideon-God pact. What was my part of the bargain?  Jesse says: beware that you honor what you've been given, and not become the fox. 

Been interested in Balaam, mostly because of the donkey and angel. See below for a post of my sermon on this.

As I prepared, I learned more about Balaam.

Who is Balaam? A mesopotamian soothsayer who “sees” into the future, usually through dreams. But is he a sorcerer or a diviner? Sorcery, or  keshafim, was banned and punished by death in Israel (Deut 18:10).  In Mesopotamian law, it is also a capital crime.  Divination, nahash, involved reading omens, casting lots, interpreting oil or water, was practiced by the Levite priests who threw the urim and thurim.  Balaam is considered nahash (23:23, 24:1) and kesem (22:7, 23:23). This form of divination could be tolerated in Israel since it wasn’t incompatible with monotheism.  
Hackett writes that "Balaam is a diviner, a form of intermediary apparently acceptable in court circles in preexilic Judah.... a typical Yahweh-prophet, one who can only speak the word that Yahweh puts in his mouth, a phrase reflecting the paradigmatic description of a prophet in Deut 18:18.” ( Hackett, 1992, p 569). 

But Balaam is more than a mouthpiece for the Israelite god. The Book of Balaam is a set of plaster inscriptions of Aramaic/ Canaanite dated 800 BCE. It was discovered at Tell Deir ˁAllā, on the Ammonite site of the Jabbok River in the late 1960s.  He is a “seer of the gods” (ḥzh ˀlhn).   Here is an excerpt of Balaam's visions (or Bileam).

The gods came to him at night.
And he beheld a vision in accordance with El's utterance.
They said to Balaam, son of Beor:
"So will it be done, with naught surviving.
No one has seen [the likes of] what you have heard!"
Balaam Reports his Vision to His Intimates.
Balaam arose on the morrow;
He summoned the heads of the assembly to him,
And for two days he fasted, and wept bitterly.
Then his intimates entered into his presence,
and they said to Balaam, son of Beor,
"Why do you fast, and why do you weep?"
Then he said to them: "Be seated, and I will relate to you what the Shaddai gods have planned,
And go, see the acts of the god!"
Balaam Describes the Celestial Vision and Its Aftermath in the Land
"The gods have banded together;
The Shaddai gods have established a council,
And they have said to [the goddess] Shagar:
'Sew up, close up the heavens with dense cloud,
That darkness exist there, not brilliance;
Obscurity and not clarity;
So that you instill dread in dense darkness.
And - never utter a sound again!'
It shall be that the swift and crane will shriek insult to the eagle,
And a nest of vultures shall cry out in response.
The stork, the young of the falcon and the owl,
The chicks of the heron, sparrow and cluster of eagles;
Pigeons and birds, [and fowl in the s]ky.
And a rod [shall flay the cat]tle;
Where there are ewes, a staff shall be brought.
Hares - eat together!
Free[ly feed], oh beasts [of the field]!
And [freely] drink, asses and hyenas!"

Nonetheless, let us return to the Hebrew Balaam. He arrives at a critical point at the end of Numbers, which can be organized like this:
(1) Israel in the Desert of Sinai (1:1 – 10:10)
(2) From Sinai to Kadesh (10:11 – 12:16)
(3) In the Kadesh area (13:1 – 20:21)
(4) Detour to avoid Edom (20:22 – 21:35)
(5) Israel in the plains of Moab (22:1 – 36:13). 
  
Oracles of Balaam  (Numbers 22-24)
Balak, King of Moab is worried about the immigrant force of Israelies plowing through neighboring territories.  Following protocol, he hires the seer Balaam to curse them. Balaam tells him he will consult El about this, so he dreams and El or YHWH tells him he can't curse the Israelites because they are blessed.  Balaam says he can only do what El prescribes, so he can't curse the Israelites.  Balak, increasingly agitated, thinks Balaam is bargaining for a higher divination fee. So he sends messengers a second time with more gifts. Balaam goes back to dreaming. He receives the same answer (no), but then El permits him to meet Balak if he repeats what El tells him to say.

The little story I love  - his trip on the donkey and encounter with the angel is Chpts 22-24.  Like the jewel in the egg, we have the story I will tell next.

References
Hackett, J.A., Balaam, Anchor Bible Dictionary,  New York: Doubleday, 1992, 569-572.
Levine,  B.A. "The Deir 'Alla Plaster Inscriptions", in: W.W. Hallo (ed.), Context of Scripture, vol.2 (2003), 140-145.
Oppenheim, A. L. The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, Philadelphia, 1956
 Unger, M.F. Unger’s Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed.; Chicago: Moody Press, 1966,  799.
See this collection of dreams in the bible

Gendlin's  Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams  helped me, an undergrad caught up in the rip tide of U of Chicago. He taught in the Psychology dept and I now wish I'd taken a class from him.  But I was consumed by the auto-hypnosis experiments of the charismatic Erika Fromm in those years, traveling like Billy Pilgrim through self-hypnotic time zones, turning myself into a tomato, growing wings.  So recently arrived as a "mk" from Philippines, the transition was its own awful Wonderland. And I was slowly dissolving, besieged by nightly terrors.  My body stitched by worms, decaying in old blood,  teeth popping out.  Some days I woke so depressed my body ached. 

Gendlin's book was practical. His method gave me questions for the nightmares.  But more helpful was his description of Focusing: the body's affirmation though a buzzy, shifting feeling when I'd found the right interpretation.  My body was willing to reveal the riddle that the unconscious hid.  Whenever I named it (Rumpelstiltskin!) a surge of energy surged forth.  Many years later, Gendlin promotes "Thinking at the Edge" through his Focusing Institute.  

"Focusing is the murky edge…" the limit situation, the place in ourselves that is inchoate.  Our ability to focus helps us slog into the mud of our murk with a confidence that our intuition has its own GPS. 

Which leads me to Flow.  The wild red-haired Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, taught in our Common Core.  (You'd think I majored in psych.)  The impossible-to-spell genius was testing wellbeing at the school where "fun goes to die."   Flow, he says in this Ted talk, is a mode of self absorption that draws you into action and creativity. It strikes me as similar to the  mindfulness that Ellen Langer has theorized about for several decades now, as too, Seligman's notion of flourishing. Mindfulness and flow restore the body-mind divide through the intuition and imagination to give us a more expansive way of being past our social instrumentality.  They free us from the lock-down of our routinized life. 

Is this solipsim? We are on the juggernaut careening towards social change and its chaos: economic stress, personal hardship, conflict, disaster, collapse. Is positive psychology a panacea?  What might focusing, flow, mindfulness, florishing teach us about resilience?

Tues May 27
Dream shard
We've moved to a small courtyard with Japanese-style open rooms, an extended L-shaped porch.  The rooms are constructed from redwood; they are small, empty,  airy and spacious. Meant for floor cushions.  We're carrying our things there. And look, look, look!  Blueberry bushes cluster along the periphery.  Abundant, deep blue. I pluck some to eat.  We have carried someone to the porch. We lay her down on the redwood floor.  

May 9, 2014
This shard of last night's dream presents itself in the middle of the day. 

Men and women stream out from a religious place - after a ceremony? They have figures marking their foreheads; I don't recall if the symbols are alike.  I think of Shaivites or the prayer bruise of devout Muslims. One brown man turns to me with a radiant sly smile and I notice his symbol the most clearly.  It is vaguely familiar- it has appeared in other dreams. Wish I could draw it here. Looks most like the symbol for Jupiter, but with three lines along the lower bar. It's tattooed on his forehead in black ink. Permanent, simpler. 

Queen Māyā of Sakya (Māyādevī) conception dream

On a full moon night of a midsummer festival, Queen Māyā retired to her bedroom and fell into a deep sleep. In her dream, she was lifted by four devas  (spirits) to Lake Anotatta in the white capped Himalayas. There, they bathed, perfumed and bedecked her with flowers. A white bull elephant clutching a white lotus flower in its trunk appeared and circumnambulated her three times. Then, he struck her right side and disappeared into her.  The queen awoke in a blaze of energy and relayed the dream to the king. Since the elephant is a symbol of greatness, he summoned 64 brahmans who told him that his son would be a world conqueror or world renouncer.   

Conception dreams are common throughout Buddhism and recorded in biographical literature of famous bodhisattvas and siddhas. Depictions of Queen Maya's dream are some of the earliest representations of Buddhism in iconography (Young, 2003, 167).  Not to be outdone, the future mother of Mahaviras, Jain Queen Trishala is also visited by a white elephant in her conception dream. This is followed by thirteen auspicious dreams.  One could say much on the topic of conception here, how women's bodies require visitations from angels, elephants, lions, and goddesses (!) to announce - and impregnate women - for a holy boy. Young notes that the Hindu Palija takas are rich with the dreams of women (166).   

Let us return to Queen Maya.

When she was nearly due, she travelled to a sacred grove near her parent's home.  In Lumbini,  when labor was upon her, she caught a blossoming branch of a tree and painlessly produced the child.  (Like Maryam in Islamic tradition, holy trees -- and their spirits--assist the birthing woman.)  The Flower Ornament Sutra depicts it thus:

As Lady Maya leaned against the holy fig tree, all the world rulers, gods and goddesses... and all the other beings... were bathed in the glorious radiance of Maya's body .... All the lights in the billion-world universe were eclipsed by Maya's light. The lights emanating from all her pores... pervaded everywhere, extinguishing all suffering... illuminating the universe (Shaw  1998).

 A few days later, she was dead. (All previous mothers died after giving birth to Buddhas.) But she watched and instructed her son from the heavens.  Buddha too can traverse these three realms. 

Siddhārtha Gautama's father, wife and aunt all share dreams portending his departure.  Gautama himself has several  dreams. In one,  "He saw millions of beings carried away by the current of a river. He crossed this river and made a vessel to carry others across" (cf Young, 31).  More famous are his five dreams before the world-trembling event of his enlightenment, itself so dream-like.  

Young argues that Buddhists hold to an the activating potential of dreams. An example occurs in the jataka tale in the Divyavadana when Gautama Buddha as a Brahman in a previous  meets Dipamkara, a former buddha who predicts his future buddhahood (1999, 26). Here, the young Gautama-as-Brahman has ten dreams (he drinks the great ocean, flies through the air, held the sun and moon, is the king's charioteer, saw ascetics, white elephants, geese, lions, a great rock and mountains).  He  takes them to an ascetic, but they cannot be interpreted.  He learns that only Dipamkara the buddha can interpret his dreams.  These dreams resonate with Queen Maya's conception dream, King Suddhodana's dream of his son's departure and Buddha's five dreams.  Through these dreams, his own route to buddhahood is predicted and projected.  And as we learn from the Divyavadana, only those with superior ability can correctly interpret dreams. 

But let us know the five dreams and their interpretation:

Monks, before the Tathāgata, the Arahat, the Fully Enlightened One attained enlightenment, while he was still a bodhisatta, five great dreams appeared to him. What five? 

The dream worlds of South Asia are verdant with imagery, profound and quixotic.  In the Kurma Purana, this kalpa (eon) is a great ocean in which Brahma (or Vishnu) is sleeping on the coil of a naga (snake). He dreams that a lotus grows out of his navel (see the Buddha's dream below) from which arises all that exists. From this dream, our reality.  Wendy O'Flaherty's Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities which traverses a wide South Indian terrain (1984) indicates that the dreams of Buddha and their interpretations shift interpretation from a Brahmanical context in which they had negative meaning to new positive angles.  From these dreams emerges a Buddhist dream theory, thin in Theravada, but rich in Mahayana. They come to one from a repository that transcends time. From birth to birth, the dreams show up as replays in the next-born Buddha.  Because these dreams are repeated in different texts, Young (1999, 31) argues that Buddha's dreams offer a map to the dream world of potential buddhas - signs to leave home.  They can point the direction towards enlightenment.  Most importantly, significant dreams that signal the presence of other realms need to be interpreted and understood within a Buddhist context.  Thus, spiritual adepts can pass back and forth between realms. 

Since the dreamers I'm following in Cambodia follow the Theravadan tradition, I am less focused on the Vajrayana tradition of dream yoga, which is intimidating in its authority over our dream life.  The Cambodian dream worlds intersect at two points: at rebirth when the returning one asks to inhabit a woman's womb, and after death, when a loved one has instructions early after death, on an unfinished task or is unable to complete the transition to rebirth.  There doesn't seem to be much literature on this arc of dreaming, a fascinating continuity. 

References
O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, University of Chicago Press, 1984
Shaw, Miranda, Blessed are Birth-Givers, Parabola 1998. 
________Buddhist Goddesses of India. Princeton University Press. 2006, p. 51
Thundy, Zacharias P., Buddha and Christ: Nativity Stories and Indian Traditions, Brill Academic Pub,  1993
Young, Serenity, Dreams, In South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia : Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka edited by Peter J. Claus, Sarah Diamond, Margaret Ann Mills, Taylor & Francis, 2003, 166-169
____________Dreaming the Lotus. Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery and Practice, Wisdom Publications, 1999