Coping Mechanisms

[Clodfobble]

I recently heard this strange story about a friend-of-a-friend: so she's a middle-aged wife, very happily married, 3 children. The day before they're scheduled to go on a vacation to the Bahamas, the husband--who is by all accounts a genuinely fantastic guy, involved in several charities and coaches his kid's sports teams, blah blah blah--suddenly dies of a massive coronary. He was quite healthy and fit, so this came completely out of the blue, and was obviously terribly devastating for everyone.

A day or two after he dies, the widow has a vivid dream, in which the husband comes to her and says that he had to die, because their youngest son was going to drown on this trip to the Bahamas, and it was the only way to stop them from going. So the woman takes this dream as true. And from that point on, she is totally serene about the tragedy, and acts like a woman who is three years out from the untimely death of her loving husband, not three days.

My friend doesn't know whether this woman has burdened the youngest son with this dream she had, though I hope not. But she says that this all happened several months ago, and if the facade is going to crack, it hasn't yet. It has apparently been a wholly successful coping mechanism for a woman who was a non-functioning wreck before the dream. I'm really fascinated by the brain's ability to come up with what it needs to heal.