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Dreaming Of The Dead

I sometimes dream about my dead father. A couple of days ago I dreamt that he was holding my nephew, who was wearing a christening gown, and smiling down at him. My nephew is named after my father, but they never met as he died before he was born.

My father really wanted grandchildren before his death, and I know he wanted a grandson to share his passion for steam engines with. It was quite a poignant dream for those reasons, but in the dream there was a great feeling of warmth and love.
 
Aha! I've finally been able to post for the 1st time, so please bear with me folks.

I've been reading with interest this topic, & I have a couple of dreams concerning relatives passed away. The 1st after about 5 years after my beloved Nana died, I was sat in my room, writing a letter when the telephone rang, - I was on my own in the house - so I picked it up, 'Hello?' said I. I then heard my Nan's unmistakable voice: 'I just want to tell you I'm alright now,' Me: 'OK, love you Nana,' I then put the phone down, as basically, I was stunned. To my knowledge she had never used a phone, & never had one in the house, whether she thought they brought bad news, I'm not sure.

The other, I daresay alot of people might of experienced this, that I was walking along a street with my Nana, talking, when we got to the roadside, she said to me: 'I have to go now, you can't come with me, if you do, you can't come back,' So I just stood & watched her cross the road.

Lastly, I remember a dream, it was a sort of party, with all chairs around the edge of the walls of the room, with old-fashioned music, my Nan & Grandad were passing plates of food around, & generally being very open & chatty, which my Grandad definitely wasn't. Not sure what we were supposed to be celebrating, there were other people there that I didn't know, possibly relations I didn't know, not sure.

Hopefully, my Nana is at peace now, as she passed away with cancer, & I think about her every day, I was 18, when she passed away, & I saw her at least 2 or 3 times a week, when she was alive. :(
 
glamchic said:
Aha! I've finally been able to post for the 1st time, so please bear with me folks.

I've been reading with interest this topic, & I have a couple of dreams concerning relatives passed away. The 1st after about 5 years after my beloved Nana died, I was sat in my room, writing a letter when the telephone rang, - I was on my own in the house - so I picked it up, 'Hello?' said I. I then heard my Nan's unmistakable voice: 'I just want to tell you I'm alright now,' Me: 'OK, love you Nana,' I then put the phone down, as basically, I was stunned. To my knowledge she had never used a phone, & never had one in the house, whether she thought they brought bad news, I'm not sure.
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Hi Glamchic, and welcome to FT :). Was the experience you describe above an actual sleeping dream or a kind of daydream?
 
The 1st 'incident,' - where I spoke to my Nana on the phone, I was awake, & not even thinking about her, I was concentrating on the letter I was writing.

The other 2, were definitely sleep dreams, as I said, the 2nd one was odd, as my Grandad wasn't very open, if you asked him things about his past, always: "What do you want to know that for?" All I know about him, from his past, is from my Uncle - who has also passed away - & through gathering titbits, via Family Tree research, which only gives you half the picture if you haven't got the people around, who you could chat to.
 
I had my post death dream about my ex recently (he died 11th of Jan this year). We went out for a meal, in the dream he was still healing and was only just well enough to go out/appear in dreams or whatever. His face was healing up enough for him to eat properly. We slept the night in a bed together (not in a sexual way- and he was wearing a white and blue shell suit for some reason). In the morning my current partner came in for me and I tried to wake my ex but it was difficult because he was still under the influence of the strong drugs he had been given at the time he died.
I'm not expecting to hear from him again.
I tend to have only one dream about a human or pet after they have died
 
My father was killed in a tragic accident, along with two other men, in 1945 about 6 weeks after I was born. Only once and that very vaguely has he featured in my dreams. Recently my daughter (age 23) has dreamt that a soldier from WW2 (father was in the army) was in her bedroom. She has had the dream several times. Apparently at first he seemed very angry but of late more peaceful. I will add that my daughter has had digestive problems including lactose intolerance which has been treated by a nutritionist and over the last 3-4 months she has had marked improvement.
 
The only times I've ever dreamt about deceased relatives, it's always a very peaceful, happy experience - I have a little chat with them where they tell me not to worry about them, and that's that.

On the other hand, my parents lost a much-loved family dog last year after eleven very happy years, and whenever I dream about *him*, I know it's wrong and that he shouldn't be there, and I wake up feeling as if I've just had a plaster ripped off an emotional wound (without wishing to sound overly dramatic). This is the third dog my parents have lost, and I've never dreamt about his predecessors at all. Very sad :(.
 
My stepdad passed away a couple of years back and about 2 months after he died, I had the following dream.
The following is a direct quote from what I wrote down immediately after having the dream; do forgive the tense....

L's family owned a lakehouse somewhere. I was out there and so were his brothers and their wives. I was outside talking to one of their relatives (who I didn't know, though he looked familiar; vaguely like Dom DeLouise) and we were looking at pics of L's childhood. Suddenly this guy turned into/was L. I asked him how the transition (from life to death) was. He looked at me for a moment and mentioned something about how when you try to go and do something there was all of this damned grass in the way. It was an allusion to all of the portrayals of Heaven as a bunch of verdant fields and plains.

He said something about a very important book coming (out? Through the mail?) that involved Transformation and Instructions for what to do. By this time, other relatives who were sitting at the same picnic table started looking at me funny. L waved goodbye and I had the impression that I'd see him again soon.

I'm in the house now, telling L's brother about seeing L. Other people walk in. I also talk to a ne're-do-well brother (who doesn't actually exist) who was talking about needing to borrow money to pay off an $8 debt. Then he wanted to raise $550 from each of us interested in taking a long road trip to Georgia.

I start talking to someone else who I sorta recognized. HE turns into L and motions for me to be quiet. I want to talk with him, so I suggest somewhere private.

Now I'm walking down to the beach and docks where all sorts of people are fishing and swimming. There are t-rexes and other carnivorous dinosaurs all over the docks, not bothering the fishermen. They catch wind of me and start hunting me. I run along the beach which is now covered with dinosaurs. I jumped, fully clothed, into the water and try to climb a cliff face. Yep, dinos there, too.
Finally, I relax and fall backwards into the water thinking that if I take a deep breath, I'll wake up (I had not been lucid until this point). This is precisely what happens.
 
First of all apologies if this has been covered elsewhere, I'm still new to this. Not sure if this is the right place for this either!
I sometimes dream about people who have died. In the case of my Mum who died two years ago, the dreams are peaceful and reassuring. Yet when I dream about my Gran who as a lovely, gentle lady, the dreams are like nightmares. I am always afraid, her house feels haunted and she is a sinister scary presence.
And the other night I dreamed about a girl who had been a close friend when I was younger. She died in a tragic accident when we were twenty. She was also a lovely, gentle person but in the dream I was terrified of her, she had grabbed me by the arms and when I said her name her eyes turned white and "dead" and I screamed and woke myself up.
I suppose what I'm getting at is why would my dear Gran and friend would want to scare me? Is it just random, inexplicable brain activity? I'm always disturbed after these dreams. Anyone care to comment?
Thanks.
 
My advice is to drink less caffeine and go to bed earlier.
 
Great post! :D

We do have at least one dreaming of the dead thread. It's one of my favourite subjects, along with ghosts, afterlife communicate and the general morbid stuff.

There is discussion of why the dead would pop up in our dreams and what they're saying to us, or more likely, what our own subconscious is telling us. ;)

As I typed that, the fillum Proof was playing, and the Anthony Hopkins character was telling Gwyneth Paltrow that he'd just died of an aneurism. :shock:

You might like this - Odd dreams of relatives who've passed over 8)
 
Interesting subject. I've had odd dreams like that too, specifically, recurring dreams involving my grandparents' house. When I was a kid by brother and cousins and I all felt totally creeped out in that house, especially in the living room, front bedroom and in the upstairs area. I used to feel like someone was watching me whenever I was alone there. Now, in more recent years the strange dreams start up for me and in each dream it takes place in a different house, but I always know it's THAT house. I usually feel trapped, somehow.

I've chalked it up to one of life's little mysteries. I can speculate what might be behind all that. Part of being human, I guess. ;)
 
grimnebulin said:
:eek: eek! are you my husband?! he's always saying that...
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Ha ha, no - I am not he. :lol:

I'm just full of boring common sense. :)
 
Something I worked out about certain scary dreams- sometimes if the dream is powerful or has a person or situation in it that is powerful it comes across as frightening when really it is trying to give you a message (like the ghosts in The Sixth Sense). If you can slip into lucid dreaming instead of running away screaming you can try to change them and maybe learn something.
 
Not boring at all, Mytho! (if I may address you thus)

L'Escargot, thanks for that link, after reading those stories I hid in a corner, quivering! :D

Marion, That's interesting, I'll give it a go. Usually though, my dreams are so mad that I can't quite "get a hold of them" IYSWIM.
I blame the medication ;)
 
grimnebulin said:
L'Escargot, thanks for that link, after reading those stories I hid in a corner, quivering! :D
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My work here is done. 8)

I've read somewhere that, because messages from the subconscious may be too raw for us to process, even in sleep, they are scrambled and disguised to soften them.

Thus, the theory goes, we often see situations and relationships distorted or even reversed. So we might dream of really fancying Mr X at work when in reality we despise him. The dream is actually about the effect our abhorrence of him is having on our work, if we need to stop avoiding him and get on with things.

In the light of this, dreaming that a dead person is alive and so we need no longer worry about them seems like an indication of a subconscious acceptance that we need to let go and move on.

If only it were that simple. :(

However, having 'happy' dreams about the dead does seem to mark a turning point in many people's experience of grief.
 
I often have just one dream about a person or animal after they die, I think I wrote about my after death dream about my ex on another thread.

Yesterday I had a dream about my daughter's dog who died of old age a few months back. I've been very upset about her death as I was very close to her in the first six years of her life but moved away and hardly saw her then she had to be re-homed for the last 18 months of her life. She died quietly in her sleep and I just kept thinking about that and for some reason it really upset me.

In my dream I was in a huge house with lots of very large rooms, the house 'belonged' to my Grandmother who spent the dream lurking around looking pretty much like the last few times I saw her alive.
My daughter's dog was ecstatically happy and hyperactive, leaping about and behaving like she did when she was at her most happy with life. I knew she was dead though and spent the dream bawling my eyes out.

I actually do feel better about her passing now. Strangely enough I didn't really care that much about my grandmother in the dream, I think that is the first time I have dreamed about her, she died before my daughter's dog was even born.
 
Here's a dog story from the b3ta site.
You may wish to turn down the gas light, stir the last embers of the dying fire, settle down in your battered leather armchair and light your last pipe of the night...


The night our dog died
When our family dog died, I was in my early twenties still living in the home I was raised, an Indian family in the suburbs of London

As anyone who has had a pet will know, it was devastating for all of us and it marks the one creepy story in my life

The evening that our dog passed away, my younger brother walked into my bedroom at about 2am and quietly asked if i was awake. Of course, that did the trick and I said I was. "Can you hear that?". With such a question, I was wide awake in a nano second and sitting upright. I strained to pick out what he seemed to hear very obviously, but couldnt hear anything. he repeated twice "there, can't you hear that?". I might add at this point that my Brother is very level head-headed. Very anti drugs and anti anything that results in loss of mental self control, very stoic... So i did not think then, or now, that he was imagining it and asked him what he could hear. "I can hear Dad outside calling me"

I got out of bed and in my sleepy state, I imagined that perhaps our Father had gone sleep walking or got stuck outside (why, I didnt know, but I was trying to match scenarios to what my Brother was telling me). He had never done either. So, we walked to my Parents room and peered into the darkness. I quietly called out "Dad?" and he woke with a slight start obviously a bit suprised to have both his adult sons looking in to the room. This time my brother just said he could hear a voice in the garden and now the whole family was awake

What followed would be comical if it wasn't so odd at the time. We all quietly trooped downstairs and I picking up the nearest solid object as now I supposed there must be an intruder in our back garden

Our garden is accessed by huge sliding glass doors. It means that you can see the outside clearer than the inside because of the ambient light from the street. As we walked towards the doors, it was obvious that the garden was empty

Again, my brother asked "Cant you all hear that???" By now he was slightly bewildered more than anything. My Father asked "what exactly can you hear?" and he told him what he told me orginally "Dad, I can hear YOU calling out to me". I still remember my Father's reaction when he asked him to repeat what he just said. My Father's face showed a sense of recognition & sadness. He seemed to nod.. He looked out at the garden and said to all of us "everyone go to sleep, I am going to stay up a while"

At this point I just thought the whole thing was rather silly and happily trooped up to bed, and was asleep immediately

The next morning, I came downstairs and of course asked what all that was about. My brother was already awake, but my Father was waiting for me to get up before saying anything

My father is a hindu. The religion is the world's oldest major religion and is a unique combination of culturally led traditions, supersitions & dogma. My Father is a humble man and never imposed the religion on us London born boys (he even sent us to Roman Catholic Schools without blinking). So he chose words knowing that his audience were in many ways removed from his beliefs, neither familiar nor overly skeptical

he told us that according to Hindu belief, when animals die, they dont know that they have passed on. Humans know that they have died, so, unless they have 'unfinished' business, they dont hang about. But pets want to come back into the home that they have lived in for years. As they are on the outside, they call out to someone in the family in a human voice that this person will recognise in the hope that they will let them in.

I went quite cold, and my Brother was so unnerved, his face actually went completely blank

My Father then said that he had sat facing the garden and prayed for our pet dog and told her to go in peace.

I never questioned my Brother about it and he did not defend what he said he had heard nor started to fob it off as something imagined

We never spoke about it again.
 
Another 'dreaming of the dead' story

2nd September 2012 - Our cat Grey (formerly Jessie) died of kidney and thyroid failure in her basket. She was roughly 17 years old: we don't know her exact date of birth.

A few weeks later, my Dad had a very clear dream where Grey returned to life. She emerged from behind Dad's garden shed and walked across the lawn in front of the shed. She approached Dad and then he woke up.

11th February 2013 - Dad died of a heart attack while trying to dig out weeds in the garden. He was behind the same garden shed as in the previous paragraph. He was found by his research assistant a few minutes later. An ambulance was called. The ambulance men carried Dad out from behind the shed and laid him on the lawn. They tried to resuscitate him but they were unsuccessful.

You might say that this was a kind of death prediction or premonition. Grey has also appeared in one of my dreams, where she was hiding in a cardboard box, then jumped out and ran into the lounge.

My Dad, my brother and I have all had other dreams of the dead. I personally have had dozens of them in the last 8 years.
 
Dunno if I've posted this one before...

Last year my paternal Grandma passed away. She had been very ill for a while and it had finally overcome her. It hit me pretty hard as we were close and tbh I'm still not entirely over it. Every week since I was little my Dad and I would go and visit her on Sundays. I loved it since I'd always have a nice time there and she made the best Sunday dinners in the world.

A few days after she'd died I had a dream that Dad and I had gone to visit her. She was pottering around the kitchen making dinner and singing to herself. I was amazed, since not only had she been so ill she struggled to walk without a frame. I said to her "Grandma, I can't believe how well you are, you were so ill we all thought you were going to die!" She looked at me, smiled and said "Don't worry, I'm alright now."

I know the most likely explanation was that it was just a dream and my grieving mind was just taking me back to a happier time but still, I like to think it was my Grandma giving me a message that she was free from suffering now.

I had another one a few months ago where my Grandma returned to earth and thought that I didn't know she was dead, so she wanted to spend one last day with me. But I knew she was dead and realised she didn't know that I knew, so I pretended that I thought she was still alive. The dream was just me and her spending time together, both knowing that it would be our last day with each other.

I woke up feeling happy and at peace after that one. It did feel like I had some closure, and it was so nice to see her again.

Writing this post has choked me up a little :<
 
Reminds me of the scene at the end of AI with the robot boy and his long-dead mother.

What wouldn't we give, eh. :(
 
dreams are imaginary

dear gran and your friend probably wouldnt want to scare you. and they didn't. you scared yourself. they weren't "in your dream." they have passed on. you created the dream from memories, things you've read, seen, and thought about, and your mind churned that mental salad up and served it to you overnight.
 
Re: dreams are imaginary

thenumenorian said:
dear gran and your friend probably wouldnt want to scare you. and they didn't. you scared yourself. they weren't "in your dream." they have passed on. you created the dream from memories, things you've read, seen, and thought about, and your mind churned that mental salad up and served it to you overnight.
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That's the point of this thread, that we dream of the dead. The dreams are often a comfort to bereaved people. We know that they are dreams.
 
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Has anybody seen 'About Time', the new Curtis film? I took my daughter to see it thinking it would just be your runofthemill romcom. The last scene when the chap time-travels to be with his dad who has died... I kept crying for hours afterwards. Dreams are a kind of time-travel aren't they? The people who've passed on suddenly there again, and they are healthy like they were years ago, and you sort of know it won't last because some part of your brain knows they are dead, but you enjoy your time with them anyway.

I had my first dream the other day about my gran who passed away last year. We weren't that close and she wasn't easy to get along with, but I was quite pleased to see her riding a kids' tricycle!

I lost my maternal gran about 20 years ago now and I still dream about the home she and granddad lived in, that I spent so much time in growing up. At first the house was exactly as it had been, and I was looking for her and granddad. Then as the years have gone by, the house became decayed, then mostly it's been somebody else's home and I've been an intruder in it, then most recently it had been turned into a hairdressers!
 
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