Ch18: My Mother’s Dream

My Mother’s Dream

On a winter night in 2023, sleet hammered against the windows of my flat in Manchester. I sat hunched over my desk, racing to finish a paper, my nose almost pressed to the cold screen, and sneezed several times in a row.

By my second year studying in Britain, I had long since grown used to its damp, chilly winters, and to dealing with headaches, fevers, and other minor illnesses on my own. I always kept a bottle of allergy medication brought from China in my desk drawer. Whenever seasonal allergies flared up, two tablets were enough to bring relief.

That day, a pollen allergy had brought on my rhinitis again. Without giving it much thought, I reached for the bottle, shook out two tablets, swallowed them, and turned back to my paper.

Less than half an hour later, it suddenly felt as though something were blocking my throat. My breathing grew rapid, and my fingertips began to go numb. I braced myself against the desk and tried to stand, but everything before my eyes abruptly went black. The last thing I saw was the cursor blinking in the document on my computer screen. Then I lost consciousness.

When I woke again, the smell of disinfectant caught in my throat and made me cough. I opened my eyes to the stark white ceiling of a hospital room. An IV was inserted into my wrist, and the heart monitor beside me beeped steadily.

“You’re awake!” The nurse’s voice was full of relief. “An allergic reaction to the medication caused anaphylactic shock. Your heart stopped for two minutes. A little later and we might not have been able to save you.”

Two minutes.

I repeated the words blankly, my mind shrouded in fog. It was only when my phone began vibrating on the bedside table that I turned to look. The screen was crowded with missed calls, every one of them from my mother.

Twenty-three calls in all.

It was four in the afternoon in Britain and two in the morning back home. With trembling fingers, I called her back. As soon as the call connected, my mother’s sobs came crashing over me.

“My girl! What happened to you? Why didn’t you answer?”

I opened my mouth, but my throat was so dry and painful that I could only whisper, “Mum, I’m all right. I had an allergic reaction and ended up in hospital.”

“All right?” My mother cried even harder. “I suddenly woke up at two in the morning. I dreamed you were standing beside my bed, wearing the blue coat you had on when you left for Britain. You said to me, ‘Mum, I’m going now. You have to take good care of yourself.’

“I woke with a start, terrified. My heart hurt as though a hand had clenched around it. I kept calling you, but you wouldn’t answer. I called more than twenty times, and my hands were shaking so badly that I could hardly press the numbers…”

Tears sprang to my eyes.

The two minutes when my heart had stopped were the very time my mother dreamed that I had come to say goodbye. Across eight time zones and more than ten thousand kilometres of mountains and oceans, she had somehow sensed, with uncanny precision, that I was close to death. Through a dream, she had caught my soul just as it was about to drift away.

The nurse handed me a tissue and said softly, “That must be the bond between a mother and daughter. It’s incredible.”

I later learned that after waking from the dream, my mother had been unable to fall asleep again. She sat on the sofa in the living room, keeping vigil by the phone until dawn. It was only when my call finally came that the weight was lifted from her heart.

I spent a week in hospital. Every day, my mother calculated the time difference before calling me. Even hearing me say, “I had some porridge today,” was enough to reassure her.

After I left hospital, I threw the bottle of allergy medication into the bin and took my mother’s warnings to heart.

I have always felt that during those two minutes of cardiac arrest, it was not the cold machines that brought me back, but my mother’s pain-filled dream. It was her call reaching across the ocean that pulled me back from the gates of death.

What people call telepathy is not mysticism at all. It is simply a mother’s love and concern for her child, etched into her very flesh and blood. That bond crosses time zones and even the boundary between life and death, becoming the warmest armour I wear in a foreign land.