Dreams: Between the Living & the Dead

Today I attended the funeral for three people—a father, his son, and his nephew. I had known the father since we were fourteen. They passed after crashing into a mountain while descending from Nashville into Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Death has been on my mind, but not in my dreams.

I recall in 2022 my aunt lost her words first, then her mind. The stroke took them both so quickly. Over two years, alongside my parents, I helped her move through a succession of care facilities, each one a smaller orbit, until finally she was held by hospice. I was there when she passed, her hands in mine, in tears, having just told her it was okay to go, and that I loved her.

Three weeks later, she came to me in a dream. She was standing in her kitchen by the dining room table I had crafted by hand—laughing and teasing me as only she would. No words, but she didn't need them. She touched my face, and I woke up weeping, but not from grief.

I think Garfield would recognize this as the "I'll Always Love You" message: the deceased assures the dreamer he or she is loved eternally, and the dreamer feels deeply comforted.

Kerr et al.'s longitudinal data confirm that end-of-life dreams and visions are common, marked by strong emotional significance. I have no way of knowing what her end-of-life dream life held, but I would like to think it was her Jesus—the Prince of Peace—coming to meet her.

Holecek frames this through the Tibetan tradition, suggesting the threshold between sleeping and dying is thinner than our waking minds admit. The psyche doesn't simply terminate; it imagines its own continuation. A bridge between the living and the dead.