I dreamt–my Canadian English is showing–of twin girls twice. About two months apart. What is it about twins and the number two?

In the first dream, they were clad in black robes (a bit scary) and in the second they were in a basement (a Jungian therapist would have a heyday with that) and I could not get to them because I was blind–clearly I was not seeing something.

In dream analysis, when a dream figure or scenario recurs, it means the dreamer has not understood and integrated the message of the dream. Dreams tend to exaggerate for effect. In other words, if we don’t get the message the first time, the next dream will be even bigger, bolder, and always more dramatic, so we pay attention.

So, I played around with the idea of twins. First, I’m a Gemini. It could be related, but this felt deeper and more significant. After all, the twins were either clothed in dark robes or in the darkness. Geminis tend to be more lighthearted than that.

Darkness, in the Jungian sense, connotes the world of the unconscious, the shadowy aspects of ourselves that we tend to ignore, repress or negate. Hmmm, there could be something there.

A bit intimidated by that and not really wanting to go there, I thought of Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers in Roman mythology, who became the constellation Gemini, but they are the wrong gender, well, only wrong in that they weren’t female. No aha’s there.

Perplexed, I decided to drink some cacao (I’ll be writing a post about my passion for raw cacao soon) and reflect. It was early evening and I decided to sit out on the deck of our cabin nestled in the redwoods. As I sat down and took the first delicious sip, two black buzzards (known in South America by the more majestic name, Condor, which I quite prefer) circled above me soaring and floating on the wind. Their twin flight was so devastatingly beautiful that I began to tear up. And then just as suddenly as they came, they were gone.

And do you know what? I made no connection whatsoever in that moment to my dream. It wasn’t until I told my husband, Scott, about the buzzards, ahem Condors, and he started laughing that I made the connection. Again, twins in black, only this time they were “clothed” in feathers and appeared in real life.

What came to me next in my cacao bliss was the concept of duality. Not duality in terms of good and evil, but rather in terms of emotions or states of being: joy and sadness, innocence and what? What exactly is the opposite of innocence? Wisdom? For an adult, yes, but, in the case of children, the opposite of innocence is a term I will loosely call, “grownupness.” And the twin girls were clearly children–about the age of nine or so.

And then it clicked. When I was nine, my father became very ill, suffering from kidney failure. He lived, but was on dialysis for many years until he finally received a kidney transplant. And everything in our lives changed. It felt as if a part of him had died. And a part of me. The joyful and innocent part. I had to grow up very fast.

The message that I deciphered from my dreams was that I needed to acknowledge and reclaim all my twin feelings to feel whole again. There is such awesome beauty in that.

Dreams can be such wonderful teachers, showing us where we are and where we need to go in terms of our self-development. My twin dreams became a beautiful gift to my soul.