So, you’re having dreams about your father, huh? I’ve been there. For a long time, if I dreamed about my old man, I’d just figure it was because I missed him, or maybe I was worried about something going on with him. Simple as that. You know, a direct correlation. But it ain’t always that straightforward. Not by a long shot.
I started digging into this stuff a while back, not because I was looking to become some kind of dream guru, but because my own head was just getting plain noisy. My old man, he passed a few years ago, and even before then, our relationship was, well, it was complicated. Like most, I guess. He was a good guy, but he had his quirks, his blind spots, just like all of us. When he passed, I thought the dreams would stop being so… intense. But nope, they just changed. They got stranger, more symbolic, less about him being ‘him’ and more about him being… something else.
It really kicked into high gear for me during a rough patch. My work situation was changing, something I’d built up for years was shifting under my feet, and honestly, I felt a bit rudderless. My kids were growing up, needed me less in the daily grind, and I was looking around feeling like my usual roles, my usual ‘place,’ it just felt blurry. That’s when these father dreams really started pounding.
My Journey Through the Dream Fog
I’d catch myself in these dreams, and they’d be vivid, proper sticking to your ribs kind of dreams. But they were often weird, really weird. I remember one where he was trying to teach me how to drive a boat, but we were on a dusty, cracked desert road. No water anywhere. Another time, he was just sitting by a window, staring out, silent, even when I tried talking to him, yelling even.
And then there were these others where he’d give me advice, but it was all riddles, or just stuff that had no obvious connection to my actual life. Like, he’d tell me to “trust the crow on the fencepost,” when I hadn’t seen a crow in years. It left me waking up with this knot in my gut, trying to figure out what the hell my subconscious was playing at. My initial reaction was just, “Man, I’m stressed.” But they kept coming.
I started to jot them down, just a quick note on a pad next to the bed. Wasn’t trying to analyze ’em, just trying to get the images and feelings out of my head before they faded. But over time, looking back at those notes, things started to click. Not directly, not like a code, but bits and pieces started resonating with how I was feeling during the day. That sense of feeling lost, needing some kind of compass, but also realizing that maybe the old ways of finding direction weren’t working for me anymore.
- The dusty road boat dream? That began to look like me, desperately trying to navigate my life, my new situation, with old tools or in an entirely wrong environment. I was metaphorically trying to sail a boat across a desert. It wasn’t about my dad trying to teach me to drive a boat, it was about my own struggle with finding the right path and the right means to move forward.
- My silent father at the window? That hit different. It wasn’t him ignoring me. It was about my own feeling of being unheard, maybe even by myself. Or perhaps, that I wasn’t articulate enough, or clear enough, in what I needed from myself or from life. He wasn’t literally silent, my inner voice was.
- The riddles? Oh man, the riddles. “Trust the crow on the fencepost.” I finally looked up crow symbolism. Turns out, they’re often about wisdom, mystery, and foresight. So my subconscious wasn’t giving me literal instructions from my dad; it was my own deeper intuition trying to nudge me, to tell me to pay attention to subtle signs, to find wisdom in unexpected places, and to look within myself instead of always seeking external guidance. My mind was basically telling me, “Stop waiting for someone else to give you the answers, look for the ‘crow’ yourself.”
It was a proper realization. My subconscious wasn’t just rehashing memories of my actual father. It was using the symbol of a father – that archetype of authority, guidance, wisdom, and protection – to work through my own current struggles. It showed me what I was feeling about leadership, about my own ability to guide my life, and where I stood in the grand scheme of things.
Once I started seeing those dreams not as actual visits or literal messages from my dad, but as my own mind trying to make sense of the chaos, to process my own feelings about self-guidance and my role, things started to clear up. I didn’t need my dad, literally, to tell me what to do. I needed to figure out how to access that “father figure” within myself, to find my own answers. Turns out, it wasn’t about him at all, really. It was always about me, and what I needed to step up and do for myself. After that, the dreams shifted again, becoming less frantic, more like a quiet affirmation, a nod of understanding from that deeper part of me.
