LOSS Program Office
721 N. LaSalle Street
Chicago, IL 60654
Main Line: (312) 655-7283
Fax Line: (312) 948-3340

Bereavement Dreams

From On Grief and Grieving by Elisabeth Kubler Ross and David Kessler

Dreams are a natural part of sleep. They embody our hopes, our worst fears and everything in-between. After a loss, it is not unusual to dream that your loved one is still alive. After her husband died, a woman dreamed there was a knock on the door to tell her there had been a mistake at the hospital. Someone else had died, it was a terrible mistake and her husband was alive, recovering and on his way home.

In the next moment of her dream, her husband was stepping out of the front seat of an ambulance with sirens blaring as if to herald the enormity of the mistake made. He walked toward her looking healthy and whole. She was overjoyed as she looked into his eyes as the sirens continued to blare…until the siren became the sound of her alarm clock.

Dreams often make promises they can’t keep, a trick of our psyche that brings with it a fleeting feeling of reconnection. Many people say that regardless of the outcome of the dream, they are grateful for even a few more moments with a loved one.

Dreams can provide information about what is really going on inside us. Often people will have dreams in which they are overcome by sense of overwhelm. A man who lost his wife said that in his dream, he was at the gym where someone kept piling more and more weights for him to lift. “Too much, too fast,” he yelled out loud as he awakened.

Our dreams can demonstrate the inevitable lack of control we feel when we are grieving. One woman who lost her sister and dreamt of being caught in a storm with no way out. That one was easy to interpret, but some dreams are more difficult to read.

Dreams may serve many purposes, including a distraction from pain or a demonstration of the soul grappling with reality. Regardless of their meaning, dreams help us deal with incomprehensible feelings while we sleep, an aid to the grief process, as the unconscious mind cannot distinguish between a wish and reality. Perhaps you are aware of illogical dreams in which two completely opposite realties exist side by side. For instance, you can be very angry in a dream that your loved one has died. At the same time you can be discussing it with them as they appear fully alive in our dream, an illogical and unthinkable experience in our waking state.

After a loss, the need to feel that our loved ones still exist somehow, somewhere, can be very important.

Dreams are very private way to find some reassurance, when our world of logic can offer us none. We may not realize how much we work out psychologically in our dream state. Consider the fact that all of us dream every night, but only small percentage of us are aware of our dreams after we awaken. Dreams can become a meeting place between the world of the living and the realm of the deceased.

Before the loss, people agree that most dreams are hard to understand because their messages are not clear. There are many symbols to be interpreted and we are left wondering about the fragmented movie we saw in our mind. After a loss, however, dreams often change. Messages are usually much more to the point and they contain signs of reassurance, continued existence and emotional support. Even when the message is not clear, the person in grief awakens from dreams of loved ones feeling grateful. Even if their visit only occurred in the dream world, it still provides a respite from the current world of pain and loss. Our dreams show us that our loved one is not in essence the sick person to whom we tearfully said goodbye in the hospital. Neither is he or she the body we saw at the funeral home. Our love one is healthy and intact, the person we knew and now long for. On some cases, dream visitations bring frustration when we can’t control them. You can’t request a dream of your loved one and be sure it will happen. And when it does happen, you can’t control content or the duration of the dream or force it to return during dreamless periods. Even so, some people report searching for to return dreams to return, just as others find themselves in crowds searching for a loved one.

Even if dreams of loss truthfully reflect the circumstance around loss, they rarely follow the actual event. A long struggle may produce a dream about finding your way through the darkness in the forest to get to your loved one. A violent death from a car accident may affect your dreams by showing you a loved one sitting in the car, alive and with friends, while the interior of the car is made from casket fabric.

When people dream of a loved one, they often report feeling a sense of peace afterward, a reassurance beyond words. Some have pangs of pain at first waking when they realized it was only a dream, but eventually, the dreams will begin to subside and become less frequent. While they are still happening, they often represent a form of communication, reassurance and emotional support from seeing the one person we desire the most.

The dream vision of a loved one can also represent unfinished business, the chance to complete something that was suddenly severed.

Dreams offer us the opportunity to say goodbye and to let go. They allow us to give and receive permission for a loved one, and us, to move on.