Cancer Premonition

I’m coming up on the one-year anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis.  I can’t believe the journey it has been and how it has deepened me and changed me.  I’ll be sharing more over the next post or two, but today I want to tell you about a really strange experience I had about a year BEFORE my diagnosis.  I had a dream about my maternal grandmother in Wisconsin who died about 20 years earlier and who also had breast cancer in her early 40s.  In the dream, I was at the farmhouse in the front room looking out the side window into the little woods of pine trees.  My grandmother came out of the woods all dressed in black with a black veil over her face.  I couldn’t believe I was seeing grandma after all this time!  She came to the window and was trying to tell me something.  I saw her mouth moving but I couldn’t hear her through the window and through the veil.  I kept asking “What?”  “What are you saying?”  Finally, as I strained to read her silent message, I made out the words,

“You are in mortal danger.”

“Oh, No!” I thought.  “I am in mortal danger?  In what way?” I called out to my grandma, “Can you be more specific?”  But that’s all she said and she left.  I then saw my still-living and healthy mother come out of the woods, but she was all in white and in a happy care-free mood.  So I thought to myself that whatever was going on was going to be ok in the end.

Later in the dream sequence, I dreamt I was telling my dad about this crazy dream I had about my grandma and mom.  The fact that I dreamt I was telling someone about a dream I just had told me that this was a message to pay attention to, but I had no idea what she was trying to warn me about.

Some time before this dream, I had gotten a really strong feeling that I wanted to get off birth control pills.  I kept saying that I felt like every cell in my body was telling me to get off of them, like screaming at me to do it.  A few months after my dream with my grandma, in what I thought was an unrelated decision, I did go off them and found out later that year that I had a cancer that grows on estrogen.  My body was trying to tell me something…

So, I don’t know if it was really my grandma who came to warn me, or if it was my body that already knew a cancer was growing that used the imagery of my grandma to get my attention.  But either way it is pretty interesting that something out of the ordinary was going on.

Our bodies seem to have an intelligence of their own, different from our thinking mind.  But our bodies are not separate from us, we are our minds and we are our bodies and we are the listener too.  So, listen to your cells…they are you.  They are the trillions of stars that make up the universe that is you and they have wisdom to share with you, if only you will listen.