In dreams, the departed
come calling. They call us on the phone, they email, they show up at the door,
they appear right inside our bedrooms, or meet us in a familiar or
unfamiliar space. Let's look at some of the main reasons for these
visitations.
The Dead Come to Seek or
Extend Forgiveness
One of the most
important things we need to understand in our relations with the deceased is
that healing and forgiveness are possible across the apparent barrier of death.
This can be the key for people on both sides to heal and get on with their
growing.
It sometimes seems as if
one of the assignments our departed set for themselves - or have prescribed for
them by their coaches and counselors on the Other Side - is to reach back to
survivors not only to seek forgiveness and closure but to achieve understanding
and balancing. When this succeeds, it can break the family curse of abusive or
destructive behaviors passed on from generation to generation.
The Dead Come to Settle
Unfinished Business
Brian's deceased
friend appeared in a dream and said with fierce clarity, "Where
is that book you took from my library?"
What is "unfinished
business" for one of our deceased may extend to achieving a lucid
understanding of what happened in the life they have just left, preparatory to
moving on to new life experiences. Yeats suggested that in an early and
important phase of the afterlife transitions, the dead engage in "Dreaming
Back", revisiting the scenes of their previous life, essentially to get
the story straight and understand what is really going on. During the Dreaming
Back, they interact with the living, in shared or overlapping dreams.
The Dead Bring a Warning
or Health Advisory
Once they are free of
their physical bodies and physically-oriented assumptions about the rules of
reality, our dead can become extremely helpful and reliable psychic advisers,
since they can see across space and time quite easily. We have this ability
too, but while we are encased in physical bodies and self-limiting beliefs
about physical laws and linear time, we often forget to use our ability to see
beyond these things. Departed friends and loved ones very frequently turn up in
dreams to pass on health advisories. They are especially sensitive to health problems
that tend to run in families.
Our dead may come to us
in dreams with warnings and advisories of any kind. The Chinese Book of Zuo
relates that the dead father of a general called Han Jue appeared to him on the
eve of battle and told him that in the fighting the next day he should avoid
veering to either right or left and lead always from the center. The general
was victorious in battle, but the enemies' arrows killed all the men
immediately to the right and left of his chariot.
The Dead Return as Guides
and Family Angels.
A young woman I'll call
Kirsty lost her grandmother - a proud, creative, take-charge kind of woman -
around the same time she developed a rare and serious illness. She then
received a dream visitation from her grandmother, who told her, "I've
arranged to be around for two more years. You and I have lots of work to do
together, Sunshine." When Kirsty enrolled for an expensive series of
therapy sessions, she dreamed that she heard her grandmother's voice on her
answering machine. She did not want to pick up for fear that her grandmother
would not really be there.
"Pick up,
Sunshine," her grandmother's voice encouraged her. When Kirsty did so, her
grandmother said, "You can save a bunch on those therapy sessions if you
meditate on your nickname. You are Sunshine, right? Be Sunshine! Let it stream
through every cell in your body!"
With the words, Kirsty
felt waves of healing light and energy rolling through her body. She proceeded
to make it a practice to sit with the sun and invoke a flow of inner sunlight
every day, and this felt profoundly healing. In another dream, Kirsty's
grandmother called to say she was going to help her arrange a move from her
apartment in Manhattan to a house with a garden, and trees, and sunlight.
Though Grandma was not
visible in the flurry of real estate moves that followed, she had been very
adept at this kind of thing, and Kirsty was buoyed by the feeling that she was
active behind the scenes. It took less than a week to sell her condo, and she managed
the house purchase in just one day. Magic. Grandma called again to say she
wanted to support Kirsty in developing a new relationship. Nothing controlling,
just a blessing. Kirsty was thrilled to find herself entering a warm and loving
new relationship with a man who was not afraid of commitment. Kirsty's
grandmother loved to paint cardinals. At her new house, Kirsty sees them all
the time, glorious flashes of bright red among the greens.
The Dead Come to Prepare
Us for Death
One of the most
important reasons our dead visit us in dreams is to prepare us for our own
crossings. It is very reassuring to know that we have friends and escorts on
the Other Side. These death guides may include beloved animals, as well as
humans, who have shared our lives. Valerie was sitting in her family home,
exhausted from taking care of her very ill mother. She was dozing when she felt
a presence. She looked up and saw her father, who had died years before. He
said nothing, smiled a beautiful radiant smile and held out his hand. Then she
saw her mother standing in front of him. Her mother took her father's hand, and
they vanished. When the nursing home called to tell her that her mother had
passed, she discovered that he mother had died at the same time she had seen
her father come for her in the dream.
The Dead Want to Pass on
a Message through Us
The dead may call on us
to pass on a message to someone who is disconnected - a person who is not
picking up his or her own messages. This is frequently the case when an emergency
is impending, and a dead well-wisher urgently wants to get an advisory through
to someone who won't pick up the phone or answer the door. The dead caller will
turn to someone else in the neighborhood who is more receptive and may be
willing to pass the message along, directly or indirectly. This is likely to
work best if the "sensitive" is family or a friend of one or both
parties.
But if the message is
really urgent, and nobody else is available, the dead caller may try to
communicate through someone who is a relative outsider. A great many people
approaching death try to blank out their awareness of what is coming, instead
of using the last stages of life as an opportunity to get ready for a grand
adventure that opens new vistas of growth and learning. The elderly may
actively refuse to communicate with departed family and friends, because there
is bad blood or, quite simply, because they are trying to avoid their
appointment with death.
The Dead Come to Show Us
their Realm
One of the most familiar
and important reasons the departed appear in our dreams is as guides to the
realms beyond physical life. A departed loved one - including a beloved former
pet - may be the soul-guide, or psychopomp, who makes it easy for us to
approach the big journey beyond physical death with courage and grace.
I have heard many, many
accounts of this, and have been blessed to help introduce many dying people to
guides with familiar faces from the other side. Here is one: "My father
visited my mother looking like he did when he was courting her. She was
grieving and he told her he wanted to describe the beautiful valley she would
first see. He showed her in a dream a vale filled with wildflowers, birds
singing, and a small brook running through. He told her he could not present it
the way it really looked, that it was more beautiful than anything she could
ever imagine."
The Dead Come as
Guardians and Guides
The ancients believed
that the illustrious dead may intervene as daimons or demigods to strengthen
and support the living. Plutarch located the base for helpful daimons who were
formerly humans in the astral realm of the moon.
The Dead Need Guidance
from Us
The dead come calling in
our dreams because they need help or guidance from us - often because they are
lost or lonely or stuck somewhere not very far away. They of course have guides
available on the Other Side, but they may have remained so physically oriented,
enmeshed in their dense energy bodies, that they are inclined to trust someone
who has a physical body more than a being who does not. Or they may simply be
shy about getting to know new people.
Yeats observed, with
poetic insight, that "the living have the ability to assist the
imaginations of the dead". I know this to be true, since I have been
called on many times to help survivors to assist departed family members to
move beyond stuck places by growing their imaginations and becoming more aware
of new real estate options and life possibilities on the Other Side.
Jung described a dream
in which he found himself at "an assemblage of distinguished
spirits". He was asked some complex questions, but the conversation was in
Latin and he was embarrassed that his command of this language was not
sufficient for him to respond. The dream spurred him to abandon his holiday and
rush home on the train to work on an answer to the question. He later concluded
that the question had been put to him by "spiritual forefathers in the
hope and expectation that they would learn what they had not been able to find
out during their time on earth, since the answer had first to be created in the
centuries that followed." [1]
Jung subsequently
speculated that "the souls of the dead 'know' only what they knew at the
moment of death, and nothing beyond that" - contrary to the
"traditional views" that the dead possess great knowledge. [2]
I think it is certainly
entirely possible that after death people try to attain an awareness that may
have escaped them during life. But there are other possible explanations for
Jung's experiences. One is that he was actually communicating across time -
speaking to people from early periods not in their postmortem state but as they
are in their own now time. Frederic Myers trembled on the edge of recognizing
this possibility, when he floated the idea of "the permanence or
simultaneity of all phenomena in a timeless Universal Soul". [3].
References
1 C.G.Jung, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. New York : Vintage, 1965, 307.
2. ibid 308
3. F.W.H .Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Volume 2 London: Longmans, Green, 1903, 76
2. ibid 308
3. F.W.H .Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Volume 2 London: Longmans, Green, 1903, 76
For much more on this subject, please see The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. Dreaming with the departed is a major theme in my new online course Active Dreaming: The Essential Training, which starts on April 18.
Photo: "Rendezvous at Thirteenth Lake"by RM
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