Dream Gates

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.

Lucille Ball was devastated when her good friend Carole Lombard died in a plane crash in January 1942. But their friendship continued after Carole’s death. Lucille explained that her decision to take the risk of launching the “I Love Lucy” show on television – that became immensely popular but seemed hugely risky at the time – was guided by her dead friend. Carole Lombard turned up in a very smart suit and said, “Take a chance, honey. Give it a whirl!” Lucille Ball recalled that “After that, I knew for certain that we were doing the right thing.” Later, at a party, she told Clark Gable (who had been married to Carole Lombard) that his long-deceased wife kept turning up in her dreams to offer helpful advice. Clark Gable reportedly “stared, gulped, and plowed off in a daze.” 

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 arrange 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.

There are other situations in which the departed seek information or guidance from the living. When I started studying and practicing shamanism with focused intention, I had many dream visits with shamans from earlier times. Sometimes they gave me instruction; on other occasions they seemed to be seeking guidance or information from me. They had a great deal to teach me, and I was humbled by their wisdom and their commitment to healing the world. But sometimes they, too, seemed to be seeking help and information from me. In terms of linear history, these dream visitors are “dead”. But they are very much alive in my dreams, and I do not believe that the field of these dreams is a postmortem state.

Jung reports some analogous experiences in his memoirs. For example, he describes 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

Parts of this article are adapted from Robert Moss, The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead: A Soul Traveler’s Guide to Death, Dying and the Other Side. Published by Destiny Books

Next: Dream Travel to the Other Side

Quite frequently dreams reveal that the departed are present because, quite simply, they never left. A California woman dreamed she entered her living room and found her departed boyfriend on the sofa watching, TV. Surprised, she asked what he was doing there. He responded, “I’m just watching TV”. He did not seem to be aware that he had died.

The departed may linger because they have unfinished business, or wish to act as guide and protector to the family, or are attached to people and places they loved in waking life, and this may be a perfectly happy situation for a year or two. But there comes a time when our departed need to move on, for their own growth, and so they do not become a psychic burden to the living. Because our society does a poor job in preparing people for the afterlife, many people who have passed on do not know they are dead, and hover in a limbo close to familiar people and places on this Earth.

We do not need to be especially psychic to notice that in a certain kind of bar, “dead” barflies outnumber the living ones. When the departed remain earthbound, the effects are unhealthy both for those who have died and those among the living to whom they are connected. When the dead are enmeshed with the living, the result is mutual confusion, loss of energy, and the transfer of addictions, obsessions and even physical ailments from the departed to the person whose energy field he or she is sharing.

When the dead are still around in a dense energy body, they can produce physical or ghostly phenomena. The dense energy body of a deceased person should not be confused with their surviving consciousness or enduring spirit. It needs to be contained and dispersed. This sometimes reqiires a “second burial”; I offer detailed guidance on how to conduct this ritual of containment band release in my Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. However much love we may have shared with a decease loved one, we do not want long-term entanglement of the energies of the dead and the living on this level.

Helping the departed may involve a loving dialogue, a simple ritual of honoring and farewell, and invoking spiritual helpers. As we become active dreamers, familiar with the geography of the afterlife, we may find we are called on to provide personal escort services and help to instruct some of our departed on their options on the other side, as explained in detail in my Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. William Butler Yeats noted quite accurately that “the living can assist the imaginations of the dead”.

Brown Lady ghost photograph by Captain Hubert C. Provand. Published in Countrylife magazine, 1936

Next: Why the dead come calling 

The number one reason men talk about dreams, in my experience, is that they have dreamed of someone who has died and the experience seemed so real that they desperately need help in understanding what is going on. I’m not talking about the brave men who come to dream classes and share thier inner lives with a mixed group. I’m talking about the guy in the neighborhood pub or on the bleachers, the cop in the all-night diner, the commuter on the train.

When I was moving into a former home, I was startled by banging on the French doors of the study in which I was shelving books. I opened the doors and a huge, wild-eyed man introduced himself as a neighbor. He was a former basketball pro. “I’ve just come from the graveyard,” he explained, breathing heavily. “My dad showed up in my bedroom last night and I had to go prove to myself that he’s still in the ground.” The cemetery was half a block away, not a long hike at all.

But in fact the distance between the living and the dead may be much shorter. It is exactly as wide as the edge of a maple leaf, said Handsome Lake, the Seneca Indian prophet.

Today, in a lovely retreat center in the foothills of the Cascades, I’m about to open a session on “Dreaming with the Departed” for a circle of 22 gifted and spirited dreamers – six of them men – who are training to become teachers of my Active Dreaming approach to dreamwork, creativity and healing. So I thought it would be appropriate to share some thoughts about what is going on when we dream of the dead.

Many of us yearn for contact with departed loved ones. We miss them; we ache for forgiveness or closure; we yearn for confirmation that there is life beyond physical death. This is one of the main reasons why people go to psychic readers.

Here’s an open secret: we don’t need a go-between to talk to the departed. We can have direct communication with our departed, in timely and helpful ways, if we are willing to pay attention to our dreams. We meet our departed loved ones in our dreams. Sometimes they come to offer us guidance or assurance of life beyond death; sometimes they need help from us because they are lost or confused, or need forgiveness and closure.

Dreams of the departed help us gain first-hand knowledge of what happens after physical death. One of the cruelest things that mainstream Western culture has done is to suggest that communication with the departed is either impossible or unnatural. There is nothing spooky or “supernatural” involved, though these experiences take us into realms beyond physical reality.

The easiest way for the departed to communicate with the living is through dreams -though sometimes the departed, as well as the living, fail to realize this. For once, Hollywood got this right. In the movie The Sixth Sense a psychically gifted young boy can see and speak with the departed. He plays counselor to a man who has died, is initially confused about his situation, and then dismayed that he cannot talk to his wife. The boy instructs the dead man, “Speak to her in her dreams, only then will she hear you”.

In most dreams, the departed appear to be living, and very often the dreamer is unaware that the person he or she encounters is “dead” until after waking. The reason is that the departed are indeed alive, though no longer in the physical realm. The departed may appear as the dreamer remembers them from their last days of physical life, especially in the first dream encounters. But over time, it is quite common for the departed to alter their appearance, to shrug off signs of age and bodily ailments, and to present themselves as healthy and attractive. People who died in later years frequently reappear looking around 30 years old.

After my father’s death, he appeared repeatedly in my dreams to offer counsel to the family, bringing specific and practical information to which I did not have access in waking life. For example, he gave me the name of the real estate broker on the other side of the Pacific – someone otherwise unknown to me – who moved with great speed and humanity (once we contacted him because of the dream) to help my mother sell her home and resettle in a community where she spent some of the happiest years of her life. My father also made a happy dream visit to one of my daughters, who bitterly regretted never having known him in physical life; he showed himself as a handsome horseman, about 30 years old, and took her riding. Through many dream encounters with my father, I was vividly reminded that a departed loved one can truly play “family angel”.

I have been dreaming of departed people all my life, and have worked with thousands of dreams of the departed shared with me by others. While the departed person in some of these dreams may be an aspect of the dreamer’s own personality or genetic inheritance – or a mask for a messenger from the deeper Self – the great majority of these dreams appear to involve transpersonal encounters.

There are three main reasons why dreams of the dead (and other forms of interaction with them) are entirely natural experiences:

1. The deceased are still with us because they have not yet moved on.
2. The deceased come visiting.
3. In dreams, we travel to the Other Side.

In future articles, we’ll explore each of these situations.

Next: When the dead are stil with us 

Sunrise photo by Suzette Rios-Scheurer

In the ancient Greek city of Pharai  there was a
busy market, enclosed by a high stone wall. At the very center of the
market, among the press of grain merchants and fish sellers, was a
rough-hewn statue of the god  Hermes, the divine
messenger.

The Greeks called Hermes “the friendliest of gods to men.”
He is the herald and interpreter for more remote Olympians,
speeding back and forth between the surface world and the spirit worlds
in his winged sandals. He presides over chance encounters and happy
coincidences. He is lord of journeys, the special patron of travelers,
including merchants, gamblers, and thieves. You will often encounter
him in border areas, places of transition: at crossroads, gateways, and
on the road itself. He also presides over the border zone between sleep
and waking–he frequently communicates with humans through dreams and
dreamlike states–and over the liminal zone between the living and the
dead.

The oracle of Hermes worked like this:

THE MARKET ORACLE

Around dusk, when business is winding down and the last vendors
are closing up shop, you bring your question to the statues of Hermes.
Your question might range from “Will I be healed?” to “Is my husband
cheating on me?” or “What will be the price of olive oil next
season?”–perfectly appropriate, since Hermes is also the patron of
commerce. All that matters is that your question reflect what is truly
important to you at this time.

You will want to bring some oil for the lamps, to show respect
for the god. You might burn a little incense. But there are no dues to
pay, and no priests to collect them. What is going on here is between
you and the god, one to one, and between the two of you and the world
You have made your modest offerings.

You are ready to approach
the statue. You will speak your question directly into the right ear of
the god. This should be shared with no one else.
Your next step is to stuff your hands over your ears, blocking
out external sounds. You will walk like this all the way to the gate
through which you entered the walled market.
As soon as you have stepped outside the market, you will unblock
your ears. The first words of human speech you overhear will give you
the answer to your question. The words might be a simple yes or no, or
an enigmatic phrase that will set you scrabbling for associations, as
you might do with a fragment from a dream. Whatever you pick up will
relate to your question. You have made sure of that by evoking the
Hermes energy, the power of synchronicity.

Adapted from my book Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life  Published by Three Rivers Press.

Herm of Hermes. Version of Hermes-at-the-Gate by Alkamenes, 5th century BCE. Now in the Istanbul Archeological Museum