Meaning Of Dreaming Of Someone Who Is Dead

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Before we get too deep into the spiritual meaning of dreaming of someone who is dead, I feel it’s important to clarify that this post is about dreaming of someone who has already died. Not someone who is dying, or dreaming of someone who’s presently alive, but you dream they are dead. This post is about dreaming about someone who you know is dead, but you’re dreaming about them as if they are alive.

As with all dream articles, the context surrounding this dream is very important. For instance, it can be quite a different meaning to dream of someone close to you who has recently died, versus perhaps a celebrity who you’ve heard of who’s recently passed away. The length of time between the person dying can also be a factor to consider. On top of all that, the context of your waking life presently has to be considered too.

So this article can only be a pointer into the right direction. You’re going to have to interpret the dream, to a large extent, by your own intuition and feelings. But hopefully this article can give you some things to think about that might prompt your own interpretation.

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Dreaming of Someone Who Is Dead Because You Miss Them

This is a common reason for dreaming of someone who has died recently, or someone to whom you were extremely close. The closer the person is to you, the longer the timeframe during which you are likely to dream of them. It’s normal to miss someone dramatically after they have died. If you are in this situation and reading this, we are sorry for your loss. Don’t be afraid to reach out to family members or friends, or professional grief counsellors if you are struggling with this. There is nothing to be ashamed of when dealing with grief.

Continue reading for other reasons that might be applicable before deciding that the only reason you’ve dreamed of them is because you miss them though. It’s possible there’s some other reason that your subconscious knows about that your conscious mind doesn’t.

Dreaming Of Someone Who’s Died Because They Can Help You With Something

Sometimes, you may dream of someone who’s died long after they’ve actually died. This can be because you’re going through something in your life that they can help you with. If you think this might be the case it’s worth writing your dream down in as much detail as you can remember. Locations you were in, who you were with, what you were doing. How did the dream feel?

Lifting Your Spirits

Sometimes, someone who’s been dead for some time will re-visit us in our dreams simply because we’re going through a rough patch and need a bit of an uplift. If the dream with this person was fairly random events, but happy ones in which you laughed with the person you were dreaming of then this may be the meaning of the dream.

The person has reached out to your subconscious mind from across the vastness of space, time and dimensions in order to remind you of the good times you had. And to remind you that they’re still there, in your heart and watching over you.

When you wake from this dream you will probably feel sad that it was “just a dream” and that the reality is not the same as you were experiencing in the dream. But don’t be sad. The person has visited you to remind you that you had those good times. And to remind you to remember those good times. Not to grieve for them, but to consider this possibility;

If you had good times in the past with that person, you can have good times again in the future and there is no need to be sad.

Helping You With A Problem

If you’ve dreamed of a person who’s died and you were undertaking some sort of specific task, then it’s possible that the person you’ve dreamed about has information or wisdom that can help you achieve that task more easily or quicker. Again, write down as much of the dream as you can so you can analyse it with better clarity as more comes in to focus.

This is even more important if the dream is recurring, it may be that the wisdom that the other person needs to impart in order to properly help you needs more than one dream to convey properly. By writing your dreams down you can look back over previous dreams and piece the parts of the puzzle together into a bigger picture.

You May Need To Help THEM With An Issue

Sometimes dreaming of people who have died happens because that person had some unfinished business they need you to take care of on earth that they can no longer do. It may be that there are unanswered questions surrounding their death, or an un-reconciled argument with someone shortly before they died. Write down the dream as soon as you wake so that the details are not lost or become hazy. Then read back over the notes you’ve written to see if there’s anything in the dream that suggests the other person needs you to do something for them.

Often, the reason will be quite clear. The other person may even tell you directly what they need. Writing this down in a dream journal can help you focus and work out what steps you need to take, if you’re willing to be the one who helps.

It May Just Be Random Brain Activity

To be honest, it’s fairly unlikely to be simply random brain activity – but it may be that the storyline of your dream is random. If the storyline of your dream of the person who has died jumps around randomly from place to place, situation to situation and seems to follow no sensible path, then it’s likely that you’re still trying to process the death of the person. You still miss them, which is quite normal. When someone dies there is no right or wrong length of time to grieve. You’re still trying to process why this happened and trying to make sense of it.

Dreaming of Someone Who Has Died Does Not Mean Bad Things Are Approaching

Many people seem to be of the opinion that when they dream about someone who has died, they themselves are likely to die shortly, or something terrible is about to happen to them.

This is not true. At all. It’s far more likely that you miss the person, they want to cheer you up, or there’s something they can help you with. The feeling of dread that sometimes occurs after we dream of someone who’s died comes from our innate fear of the unknown. Our rational mind knows the person is dead, so it questions how it can be that we saw them again. It arrives at a conclusion based on fear, not of joy.

Of course, this very much depends on what relationship you had with the person before they died. In this post we’ve largely gone over the positive sides of dreaming of someone who’s died because you loved that person or respected them in some way. There may well be people who dream of someone who’s died who they despised, or who was awful to them in some way while they were alive.

Again though, context is going to be needed to interpret the dream.

Perhaps The Person Seeks Your Forgiveness

If you’ve dreamed of someone who wronged you, perhaps badly, while they were alive, it’s possible that they have returned to visit you in your dream to seek forgiveness. There are significant spiritual benefits to forgiving someone and it may be that something happens in the dream that helps you do this.

Sometimes, the person who has wronged you does not see what they did was wrong until after they’ve died. Only then can they see the full big picture impact of what they’ve done to you. It may be, especially if they’re asking for forgiveness in a dream, that they only now realise how badly they’ve hurt you. Write down the dream, and see how it makes you feel to think about forgiving them.

Or They’ve Come To Forgive You

Similar to someone returning to you in a dream when they’ve died who seeks your forgiveness, sometimes there may be people in our lives who’ve died before they had a chance to forgive us for the things we’ve done against them. It’s possible that this is the reason the person has come to visit you in your dream.

Only you can know the answer to this one. You’ll need to look at the context of the dream, the context of your relationship with the person about whom you’ve dreamed and of course the current situation you’re going through in your waking life.

Summary

There’s a multitude of reasons why a person might visit you in a dream after they’ve died. As with every other dream interpretation, so much relies on knowing the context around the dream. Context from your everyday waking life is also important – as is the content of the dream itself and how you felt.

If you feel you’re having recurring dreams and they’re becoming disturbing you could consider professional dream interpretation and psychological help to get to the bottom of why it’s happening and how to act on the meaning behind it – if there is any.

Dreaming of someone who is dead is not in itself a bad thing, there are lots of positive reasons why this might have happened, as we’ve outlined in this article.

We hope you’ve found this post helpful. If you have please feel free to share it using the buttons below. If you have your experiences of this, or would like to ask any questions – please drop us a comment using the form below.

Thanks for reading and all the very best.

Featured Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay