Beloved Dead in Dreams

A few years ago I had the privilege of speaking to some students who were around 12 and 13 years old about dreams. Among the many questions they had about dream symbols, a few wanted to know about the appearance in their dreams of loved ones who had died. The dreams I heard reported that day were comforting, despite re-awakening grief. One girl dreamed that a friend who had been killed in a car accident had appeared to say good-bye. Another reported a dream shared by his mother, his sister, and himself, that his deceased father had taken them all on a car ride into the mountains, stopped at an overlook and then spoken to each of them privately, telling them he was okay and they should take care of each other.
 
The question these students had for me was whether their loved ones had actually been present, or whether it was “just a dream,” a construct of their minds like their nighttime dreams.
 
How to answer such a question? I’d had my share of such dreams. When I moved to a new town, I began having dreams of a high school friend who had attended college there. I’d heard, years earlier, that she had a brain tumor, but had lost track of her and didn’t know if she were still alive. I began to have dreams in which she appeared and my overwhelming need in the dream was to find out where she was in waking life, so that we could reconnect. I asked, over and over, “Where are you?” but she never answered. I always woke from these dreams with grief and longing. It was the early days of the Internet, and I tracked down a phone number. I called, and reached her mother, who told me my friend had died several years earlier. After that, I had one more dream about her, where I was lucid enough to know she was dead and could converse with her holding that knowledge in mind. She never showed up in my dreams again.
 
Was her spirit trying to communicate, to say good-bye? Or were these dreams that arose from my own psyche as a way to process the loss of my friend? Clearly, there’s no way to answer that empirically, but my sense is that she was really there. The dreams had a different feel to them than ordinary dreams, a luminosity and intensity of emotion that surpassed any dreams I’d had up until that point.
What I told the students who asked me about the dreams of their loved ones was that no one could say for certain, but that I certainly believe spirits of the dead are able to communicate with us in dreams. My answer only confirmed what these children already suspected, that their dreams had been true communication. Of course, only the dreamer can say for sure what his or her dream means, but when I offered my opinion the students had that sense of “aha,” and “yes, that’s so.”
 
I’ve had many dreams of those I loved, some feeling just like dreams, others feeling like actual interactions with my loved ones’ spirits. While I can find metaphorical meaning even in the true visitation dreams, I choose to believe what my heart tells me is so, that in those blessed moments, my loved ones have come to say hello.