(Excerpted from The Complete Dream Book).
Years ago, I lost a young friend to suicide. He had a medical condition that was deteriorating and in a time of despair, lost hope and took his own life. Shortly after I was informed of his passing, I had a dream that I will never forget. It started me on a field of research where I have been stunned at every turn, where my assumptions have been proven utterly wrong.
In the dream, I was seated in a movie theater, up in the balcony. A boisterous young person swept into the aisle and plopped down in the seat beside me. I gasped as I glanced at him, for it was my young friend, apparently alive and well, his medical condition obviously healed. He laughed softly with glee at my startled reaction. As is typical of dreams like this, the scenery of the prior scene melted away, and my friend and I were alone in conversation, aware that this was a dream state, but also unmistakably aware that this was more than a dream.
I asked him how he was, what he was doing, if he was OK. He replied excitedly that he was fine, very happy, and was not being punished for taking his life. “I do have to take some lessons over, though. Everything we do is really a lesson, I wish I’d known that.” I marveled at his healthy appearance, for he glowed with vitality and light. He shook his head and said he shouldn’t have killed himself. He was now taking two particular classes over: Trust and Responsibility.
Then he launched into the reason for his “visit.” Could I please do him a favor? He had been trying to get a message through to his best friend, a woman called Sarah, but he could not break into her dreams for some reason. She was desperately unhappy and grieving for him, and was also terrified that he was meeting with a horrific fate, because she had a traditional faith that suggested this might be the case. I agreed to pass the message on, and he made me promise definitely that I would do so and would not change my mind once I was awake. Pleased with our bargain, he then disappeared.
The next day, I awoke and was horrified. The last thing I wanted to do was contact this young woman, in the midst of her grief and tell her I had a message from the other side. I barely knew her and understood that her beliefs probably did not include the dream-experience I had just had.
But I remembered making the promise, and dead or alive, I do take such things seriously. So I made a date to have lunch with this young woman and relay the message…somehow.
We met a few days later and had a pleasant lunch. I felt we had a comfortable rapport and then began to launch into my story of the dream. She held up her hand with a smile and interrupted me. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know what you’re going to say. You are the fourth friend that Pete has come to in a dream, begging them to tell me that he is OK.” We both laughed at once. This was so like the determined and willful young man! He apparently was jumping into friends’ dreams willy-nilly, but could not get his message directly into Sarah’s dream world. Between the time he had come into my dream, and the time we met for lunch, he had been able to connect with a few other friends as well, just to make sure. We had all received essentially the same message: Pete was OK. He was sorry, but unharmed and unpunished, and he was frustrated that he could not get word to his best friend, Sarah.
The style of this experience, the blitz of communications and promises to relay the same message all were so utterly like the personality of our young friend, that none of us could deny our belief that we had been visited by him. This is one of the hallmarks of the visitation dream: when you awaken from it, you have a powerful feeling that you have just been with the person.
Over the years, I’ve been able to collect stories like this one, and to compare the similarities and differences. Visitation dreams come to believers and non believers, to people of all faiths and all ages. They are often punctuated by family members shared experiences, waking life coincidences that appear to follow up the dream.
If you have had an experience like this, and can spare a few minutes to answer 10 questions about it, I would be very grateful. Here is the link to a short research survey on this topic. Survey.
If you want to learn more about my research into contemporary dream trends, themes, age groups and symbolism, please pick up a copy of The Complete Dream Book.
Thank you for your help!
The most common dreams in North America and why we share so many themes with one another.