Handsome Lake, the Seneca Iroquois prophet, said that the distance between the living and the dead is exactly as wide as the edge of a leaf of the maple tree. There may be not distance at all, just variable receptivity.
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 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
Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.
Photo: Cemetery in Ann Arbor by RM
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