Lucid dreaming and loved ones (potentially triggering)

[stargazercmc]

Someone I care about committed suicide and was found last week. In the two weeks she went missing before we knew for sure what had happened, I had a lucid dream with her in it. In my dream, she appeared before me and I recognized that I was dreaming. I reached out to touch her, thinking that if I did so, it would make me wake up. I didn't. Instead

Comments

[avahgdu]

I have great respect for the non fluffy part of your brain and feel that a healthy dose of reality checking is always good

[stargazercmc]

Thank you for your sympathies. It's been a very long, difficult week since we found out.

She knew I would be open to the idea of dream visitation. In the past, we had many frank discussions not only about her depression but also about my my great-aunt in relation to my dreams.

For what it's worth, I know of at least one other person who dreamed about her the same night I did. We discussed it the next morning. He's much more skeptical about dream visitation than I am, though, and his dream seemed much more disjointed in structure. In my dream, she was clearly telling me to let her go and that she couldn't stay. But that could go back to the whole "being open" thing; maybe she was reaching out to him as well but he threw up some subconscious blocks.

You're probably right - so much of me is trying to make sense of all this. While I'll never understand the choice she made, it was like I knew she was gone after that night and began the mourning process even before we received official word.

[brujaoscura]

Hon- since my fiance passed- I have had any number of lucid dreams about him- he's talked to me about things, he's instructed me, expressed pleasure- or displeasure- and I wonder if he has moved on at all. Sometimes he comes with a message- sometimes not.But he IS there- I can still feel his very slight frame, still see clearly his eyes, and there is a sense of a living being around him- not a ghost- but I KNOW he is dead- I was with him when he died.

[supermouse]

I've been visited in my dreams a couple of times by people shortly after they've died and it's always very, very vivid and leaves me with a sense of their presence when I wake up. I keep open-minded about it - I don't tell anyone about the dream, but I do hold onto it as a comforting memory of the deceased, as much as any memory from when they were alive.

BTW, I am very sorry for your loss.

[happy_heidi]

I've had dreams about the dead several times. The first was a friend in high school who died in a car accident. After her funeral, I dreamed of her coming to check on me and make sure I was ok. Everything was very vivid, and it did not fell like a normal dream. She came and talked to me, very relaxed, nothing weird, except she was in black and white and the rest of the dream was in color. (Like the movie Pleasantville.) I asked her about it and she just shrugged and said that's how it is when you're dead.

The second person was my grandmother. I dreamed I was at her house, and she was in the kitchen puttering around, and sitting in a chair in the living room listening to people talk, very normal. Then I remembered she was dead, and realized no one else in the dream could see her. She was just in the background. I talked to her, and she said she was waiting for my grandfather. I woke up the next day freaked out because I knew something was going to happen to him. He died a few weeks later.

[fourth_moon]

My heart-felt sympathies for what you & your friends are going through. I lost two friends through suicide and it's harrowing. Loss, guild, grieving, the whole mess. I hope you have friends to talk to.

I've been in a work shop on dreams a while ago and there was one case of a woman dreaming about someone trying to enter her body - not sexually, but like taking it over. It wasn't anyone she knew, but apparently she recognized him later on a picture. He had died in the house she was sleeping in; a violent death.

Based on that, I wouldn't exclude a contact with someone who hasn't quite left our "normal" world in a dream state, where your subconscious is more dominant than in sleeping state. But as an earlier poster said: both explanation, your mind producing the dream or an outside presence making itself felt, could be true, and you don't have to decide on one.

Given the time of year, I wonder wether there's a ritual you can do with someone you trust in memory of your friend and to help all the bereaved ones.

Best wishes to you!