Grief Dreams

Has someone you’ve lost come back to you in a dream? Do you ever catch a glimpse of them turning the corner just beyond you, or suddenly sense their presence strongly? Dr. Joshua Black’s research on grief dreams explores the experience of being visited in dreams by our deceased loved ones, as well as having experiential encounters where we feel or sense their presence while awake. If this is your experience, it’s a very common one. In his research, Black found that 86% of people who lose a partner experience these dreams, and 78% of people who lose a pet.

Given that searching and yearning for our loved one is a core experience of bereavement, it makes sense that these dreams can be world-shaking moments of contact. People often remember these dream visits from their loved ones in precise detail, unusual for the hazy norms of dream memory. Sometimes the message feels clear, and the contact can leave us with a thread of comfort in a storm of grief. At other times the dreams can be frightening or disconcerting, surfacing complex dynamics, reliving traumatic loss, or reflecting the intense pain of grief life. Like every other stage of a relationship, grief is marked by complex dynamics, fears, desires, and frustrations. And it is also like nothing else.

For those who want to experience (or experience more) grief dreams, Black shares his Dream Builder process, which helps people imagine a dream with their lost loved one. I particularly love step 3, which asks you to choose the clothing of everyone in the dream as specifically as possible. There is so much grief in these not-worn things, something that the poet Emily Fragos addresses in her poem, “The Sadness of Clothes.” She writes:

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived
their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.

Fragos urges the clothes to let it out, to speak of their grief. I’m sure many can empathize with their avoidance and despair in grief, feel ourselves as “the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly/ folded across the chest.”