Spare us those doomsday prophecies

I used to know someone that often said that she had the gift of interpreting dreams. The only problem was that her interpretations were never positive. She would have a dream, and then wake up in a panic and talk about how a calamity was about to happen to someone she knew.

When I would inquire how she knew that, she would talk of seeing a cup half full of water and straw on a plate, or something like that. Another day she would dream and declare that someone she knew would die that week. I indulged her until she started dreaming about me.

The first time she dreamt about me, before she revealed it, she started by asking me all sorts of questions, which I answered with mounting alarm. Eventually, she disclosed that she had dreamt about me, and that even though the dream had not been precise, something momentous was about to happen to me, though she wasn’t sure whether it was something good or bad. It is at that moment that I stopped indulging her. I told her to keep her dreams about me and their interpretation to herself because I was quite happy to go about life without knowing what would happen to me the following week, or the following year for that matter.

My argument is that life is unpredictable enough as it is without having to go about it waiting for the sky to fall on you or a tractor to run over you, or even waiting to win the jackpot that will change your life for good. If anything, my dreams are quite messy, and if someone was to attempt to decipher them, they would get quite confused.

Take yesterday for instance. I dreamt that I was attending a wedding, a second later, I was in a cowshed knee length in muck, and when I finally managed to wade through it, I found John Cena, (you remember the wrestler?) waiting on the edge, and just when I was about to step out of the muck, he shoved me back in and started laughing.

And don’t ask me how I then found myself seating in a palace eating grapes with a queen, even though the dream ended with me slipping down a cliff and falling endlessly, mercifully waking up before I hit the bottom. Now you try and interpret that.

During the time that I knew her, the person I told you about up there lived a life of trepidation. Everything that happened to her had to have meaning. A crow cawing at a certain time of the day would have her a in a cold sweat. Once, a neighbour’s hens begun clucking sometime at night, (I didn’t hear it) and when I woke up the next morning, she informed me that it wasn’t normal, that when that happened where she comes from, they held a cleansing ritual. I’m not the superstitious type, so I remember having a good laugh and dismissing her. Also, she hadn’t started dreaming about me yet.

Don’t get me wrong, superstition aside, I don’t doubt that there are those who have the gift of prophecy, but life is challenging enough as it is without having to carry the additional weight of ‘what if’, if anything, what must happen will happen when it happens. Life must follow its course, and there’s nothing we can do about it, whether we dream about it or not.

- The writer is Chief Production Editor at NMG. Email: cnjunge@ ke.nationmedia.com