She notices there is a huge glass screen on the wall of a house, to her  left. The glass reminds her of the wall of an aquarium. Things are moving behind it. The scene on the other side is intensely animated and alive. It’s hard to make out what is going on, but this is not actualy an aquarium, and what lives here is something other than fishes.

Her grandmother is standing next to her, intent and curious. She is vaguely aware that this is not an ordinary situation, since her grandmother died many years ago. It does not occur to her that the dream is anything less than real, because it is vividly real.

She woke with many questions. What is the screen? Why is her grandmother present? Why would her grandmother want to jump in her dreams?

I suggested that if this were my dream, I might speculate that my grandmother’s curiosity is centered on whether I will understand that the screen between this world and the Otherworld, and between the living and the departed, is rather porous. We can step through – or simply see through – from either side.

It’s not clear whether the dreamer has joined her grandmother on the other side of the screen, or whether Grandma has stepped through to join the dreamer on her side.

Why would a deceased relative want to “jump” in a family member’s dreams? Because it is the easiest way for the departed to communicate with the living.

As for the screen, I am reminded of the saying of Handsome Lake that the dimension between the living and the dead is exactly as wide as the edge of a maple leaf. My mind goes to a series of encounters with the departed – facilitated by a special friend on the Other Side – in which my perception was trained. I was instructed that I would start by viewing the “dead” people selected for these interviews as if through the veil of fine muslin curtains. With practice, blurred forms on the other side of the screen would achieve higher resolution. I described what I learned in these conversations in my Dreamer’s Book of the Dead.

The woman who dreamed of standing with her deceased grandmother before the glass screen remembered that this was jot the first time she had seen something of this kind, in the kind of dream that awakens us. She had once dreamed that a poster on the wall of her bedroom turned into a glass screen, again providing a view to a lively scene whose characters she was not yet able to make out distinctly.