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In her new memoir "The Next Day", Melinda opens up about the journey leading to her 2021 divorce, tracing it back to a series of dreams in 2019. In a recent conversation with entrepreneur Jamie Kern Lima, she shared how one dream, in particular, became a turning point.
"You say an article had come out suggesting your ex-husband not only went against the marriage, but also your values, and you started having dreams of a crumbling foundation," Kern Lima said in an interview released recently as she asked Melinda to share more about those dreams.
"I have a very rich dream life, and I have for a long time," she said, as quoted by HuffPost. "Some dreams will take me years to understand, but if they’re recurring, I know I need to pay attention to them."
Melinda recalled one particular dream that brought her clarity. "This dream, as I say in the book, doesn’t really take Freud to figure it out," she joked.
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Bill Gates and ex-wife Melinda French Gates. Photo from Instagram |
After "certain things came out publicly," she dreamt she was standing on a cliff with Bill and their children. "My part of the cliff crumbled away," she remembered. "I was dropping down into a pit and they were still on the edge of this cliff together, and they were safe ― so I wasn’t worried about my children."
"But I knew when I woke up, ‘Oh, this means I need to separate and do something else,’" she added. "I need to figure this out, and I’m going to be alone in figuring this out."
This moment of insight led her to ask the Microsoft co-founder for a divorce, which she called "unbelievably painful" during a 2022 interview with Fortune.
Their high-profile divorce was finalized in 2021. Bill, 69, admitted in a January interview with The Times that it was "the mistake I most regret" and said it left both of them "miserable" for at least two years.
