Dreams of the Dead

Tricks of the mind or visitations? Does it really matter?

What would it mean for a dream to be real?

When we discuss the phenomenon of dreaming, we often place it at the opposite end of the spectrum from reality—and it is hardly surprising that we do so. Compared to the waking world, dreams are absurd fantasies. The structures and laws that let the real world be fall apart. Gravity is a suggestion, and morphology a whim. In any moment a dream can shift into something it was not before, and the dreaming mind won’t blink twice at the change.

Thus, with good reason, we all agree that dreams are not real.

Don’t we?

A strange thing happens when we stop categorizing the experiences of life into neat Linnaean groups and instead focus simply on the experience. Words like real or unreal cease to have meaning, and what remains is the collection of experiences that make up a life.

Have you ever had a moment in waking life that, for any number of reasons, felt like a dream? Have you ever had a dream that felt indistinguishable from real life? If these two experiences were truly as opposite as we treat them, then why would anyone ever need to ask to be pinched—“just in case I’m dreaming”?

Dreams are an easy subject for endless philosophizing. They can be stripped bare in search of meaning or origin, and by the end, nothing remains but a bit of sleep in the corner of your eyes and the beautiful array of lights dancing across an EEG.

Yet the ancient man did not need to ask his priestess if a dream meant something. When he had such a dream, he simply knew. Just as you need not ask another if something in waking life is important to you. When it is, you simply know.

When we approach our experiences this way, we stop treating life as something to file away for later and instead embrace each moment fully. We lean into the experience, and by doing so, we recognize the emotions, thoughts, and sensations that accompany it. The more we practice this, the more we begin to see that those emotions, thoughts, and sensations are the experience.

The question of whether or not a dream is “real” becomes unnecessary.

To prove my point, I want to share with you a dream I had earlier this week.The usual nonsense of dreaming had left me in a strange, unknown city, and I had lost sight of my guide. I tried to find my way, but each turn left me more directionless than the last—until finally I found myself at an inn I had never meant to find.

I was struck by the involuntary nature of my arrival, for when we look to stories and legends for similar instances, it becomes clear that certain places cannot be reached through intentionality.

Dorothy is delivered to Oz by a storm.
Alice arrives in Wonderland by tripping into a rabbit hole.

So too had my dreaming self stumbled upon a place not easily reached.

Inside, I was quickly swept up in a hubbub of people too busy to notice me. Shuffled this way and that by the current of their purpose, I suddenly found myself pressed against a stairwell wall—where a familiar face greeted me with surprise.

“Ryan! What are you doing here?” my grandmother asked.

“Grandma!” I exclaimed, with the shock only natural to someone greeted by the dead. She beamed a smile I could not help but return, then took my hand and led me out to the street.

She was just as I remembered her—not at the end of her life, when arthritis had curled her hands and dementia had dulled her eyes, but as she had been when I was a boy. When she sat me on her lap to read me stories. When she commanded her kitchen, lifting me to peer into bowls of cookie dough and platters of lasagna. She had all her strength and grace, none of the frailties of age.

The only difference was that she was smaller. Not shrunken with age, but small in the way of a child. The way she grabbed my hand and led me eagerly into the street made her childlike size all the more fitting—for here was a woman unburdened by the weight of the world.

Outside, the world had transformed in that shifting way of dreams. What had been a tangle of streets and alleys now carried the neat order of an airport terminal.

My grandmother, now the size of a toddler, tugged at my shirt until I lifted her onto my hip. She waved at strangers and laughed gleefully in the innocent way of children—until we reached a security checkpoint, where she suddenly grew heavier. So heavy that I was forced to set her back down.

A small, stern man held out his hand for a fee.

“Oh no, sir. I’m only passing through,” I explained.

He looked me up and down, then tilted his head in the direction I was headed, granting passage. With my grandmother’s hand in mine, we continued on.

But when I searched the terminal for something to eat, my grandmother dropped my hand. When I looked down, the terrible frenzy of her dementia had returned to her eyes.

“Where am I?!” she cried, fear in her voice cutting deep.

Before I could speak, she bolted. Terrified, I chased her, the surroundings dissolving into a blur of anxiety—nothing definite except her form ahead of me.

“Grandma, wait! Please, stop!” I begged. She looked back, no recognition in her eyes, her face warped by fear, transforming her. And then she was a small dachshund weaving through legs and strollers, too fast for my clumsy human legs to follow.

The last I saw of her, she slipped through a hole in a chain-link fence and vanished into a brownstone. Out of breath, I followed just in time to catch her tail disappearing behind a closing door.

I stood outside and pleaded. I told her I hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye. That I only wanted to know she was okay. I stood there an eternity, tears streaming down my face—until the door opened.

My grandmother stood before me, putting her hair into the bun that would be her signature look for decades. She started when she saw me.

“You’re still here?!” she asked, surprised. Then she walked up, hugged me, kissed my cheek—and before she let go, I was back in my bed, my face wet with happy tears.

---

The experience of this dream—the feeling of it—was no different from the experience of a true reunion. That hug was so real that, upon waking, there was no difference between the experience of my dreaming self and my waking self. The tears were equally real on both ends of dreaming.

Beyond the separation of dreaming and waking, the experience seemed to transcend even the divide between the living and the dead.

I am well-versed in stories, and I tend to see phenomena through their narrative elements. So to me:

• the unintentional arrival at the abode of my departed grandmother,

• the airport terminal as a threshold place, neither here nor there,

• the Charon figure asking for his fee and judging me too alive to pay,

—all of it conspired to create an experience that felt like limbo. A world between life and death, where the living and the dead might walk hand in hand and share a moment denied to them on either side of the veil. And when I awoke with a gasp, that first breath of air made the experience all the more convincing.

I understand there are countless arguments to convince me this was nothing more than a dream, and that dreams are not “real.” But to insist on that path risks rendering all meaningful moments empty.

If a dream can be the means by which I hug my departed grandmother, then I am glad for it. If such a dream leaves me more grateful for those I’ve lost and those I still have, then I am glad for that too. I find no need to dissect the dreaming brain to uncover how it happened. I find no need to render the dream into its symbolic roots to parse out every fleck of meaning.

It is enough to have had the chance at all.

---