A Dream, Some Info That Came Out In Public: Melinda Gates On What Drove Her Divorce From Bill Gates

Melinda French Gates, who divorced Microsoft founder Bill Gates in May 2021, revealed that a recurring dream drove her to separate from her husband.

According to Melinda, her dream, at the onset, made her think that she needed to separate from her husband. Additionally, she said that certain information floated in the public domain also encouraged her decision.

Gates’ revelation about her dream first came in April this year, when, during a podcast episode, she said she has had a “very rich dream life”. She also said she tried to understand her dream and decided that it was time to part ways with Bill Gates.

“For me, not for everybody… because I know some people say they don’t dream, or they dream very little. But for me, I have a very rich dream life, and I have, for a long time, and have tried to understand my dream,” Melinda told the podcaster.

“Some dreams will take me years to understand, but if they are recurring, I know I need to pay attention to them, anyway, this dream, as I say in the book, doesn’t really take Freud to figure it out,” she added.

“After those articles, the things had come out publicly. I had this dream that I was on a cliff, and my ex-husband, Bill, and the kids were also on the edge of the cliff. My part of the cliff crumbled away, and I was dropping down into a pit, and they were still on the edge of this cliff together, and they were safe,” Melinda said during the podcast.

“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, I need to figure this out and I’m going to be alone in figuring this out’,” she said.

“…And that’s hard, and sad, and scary, but I needed to tune to that,” she added.

Now, in a recent interview, Melinda revealed that she started having the dream in 2019.

She also revealed that she suffered panic attacks before and during the course of her divorce.

Melinda said she suffered her first panic attack in 2014, while she was having lunch with Bill Gates, after which she started receiving therapy for the same. Reflecting on her divorce, Melinda said, “When you’re leaving a marriage, it’s very, very hard, and the negotiations were tough.”

Bill Gates and Melinda Gates announced their divorce and an end to their 27 years of marriage in May 2021, and said that they would continue to work together at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable foundation.

The Gateses got married in 1994 in Hawaii. They met after she began working at Microsoft as a product manager in 1987.