My Daughter's Dream Predicting the Future

Ten years of extreme conflict generated thousands of emails between my ex-husband and me and between me and the friends and mentors who helped me through those years.  I found this one email from November 2009, recounting a dream my daughter had.  I obviously edited names out.  I also changed one confusing sentence. Otherwise, the email is as I wrote it.  The truth is, we all had dreams that seemed to foreshadow the future.


 Date: Mon, November 16, 2009 8:39 am
To: “C”

11/16/09
Dear “C”
The kids didn't call Dad last night, and he didn't call them. This is 
The second time, he didn't call them. We turned off the cell phone at 
9 and the answering system, but not the ringer of the home phone at 9.
I helped my daughter with her homework for 24 minutes, but she ended up 
being very late and slow with her chores. She was rude to me when I 
told her to hurry up, so I didn't snuggle with her as usual.

In the morning, my daughter told me she had a dream. She said that these teenagers came to burn our house down. Dad was with us. We all escaped. I had a two-seat car, and I took her brother. Dad had a two-seat car and took “our daughter.” 

She (my daughter) ended up in a hospital that blew up and burned up.
I think that means that if she chooses Dad's coping skills of blaming others, 
if she is rude to others, she will end up destroying her own life.

My daughter was only 10 at the time of this incident. A 9 PM bedtime on a school night was appropriate for her age.

I think my daughter knew she was making a bad choice by choosing her father's house and her relationship with her father and stepsister over my home and her relationship with me. The problem at Dad's house is that my daughter's stepmother was inclined to criticize, manipulate, and emotionally abuse everyone around her. Her ultimate goal was to control everyone. We now call what she did coercive control. 

Now, 17 years after my daughter's dream about ending up in a hospital that blew up when she went with her father, I know what happened.  My daughter went to live with her father, and I rarely had any contact with her for a year and a half until her father's lawsuit against me to take custody of and contact with my daughter from me went to court. I won the case so thoroughly that the judge ordered my ex-husband to pay 90% of my attorney's fees, but my daughter developed Borderline Personality Disorder, a tendency to experience prolonged and severe emotional breakdowns, and ended up in emergency rooms a few times and a psychiatric hospital at least once. The general public may not know that Borderline Personality Disorder is a serious disorder often suffered by survivors of child sex abuse. It is characterized by chronic depression and emotional breakdowns. Consequently, my daughter's dream back in 2009 seems uncanny.

Only after years of living with her father and stepmother did my daughter struggle with so much depression and so many outbursts of anger. One may also accuse me of being an overly proud mama, but my daughter is really intelligent and academically gifted. When she was young, she wanted to be a pediatric oncologist. She could have reached that goal if she had not been through so much coercive control/emotional abuse. Maybe she will still reach that goal, but she has taken a big detour she could have avoided.

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