How Visitation Dreams Can Help You Overcome Grief

Your dreams are an innate gift. They possess the ability to open the Sacred Doorways to the Divine. Visitation dreams have the ability to reconnect you with your deceased loved ones. Your loved ones miss you as much as you miss them.

Death is the closing of one door while opening another.

Bereavement is a ubiquitous part of being a human being. Almost no person makes it through life without having to cope with the loss of a loved one. The loss of a parent, child, or grandparent can be extremely distressing. But, just as we grieve the loss of our loved ones, they also miss us. Dreams are the doorway between the realms of the living and the dead.

Rather than the end, death is a new beginning.

How often have you heard someone say, “I dreamed of my mother last night, and the dream was so real I forgot she was dead in the dream and hugged her. I was so happy to see her.” In most dream visitation cases the dream does not feel like the typical run-of-the-mill dream. Whether it is a mother, father, sister brother, best friend or a beloved distant family member, grief from their death is emotionally painful and can last for a very long time.

How often have you heard someone say, “I dreamed of my mother last night, and the dream was so real I forgot she was dead in the dream and hugged her. I was so happy to see her.”

Medically induced sleep is one way to deal with extreme trauma and grief.

For many bereaved persons, the usual treatment for grief-related sleep disturbances is a course of hypnotics prescribed by their general practitioner. During the fourth of a five-part interview series on the Kat Kanavos Show featuring the keynote speakers, and featured speakers presenting at the International Association for the Study of Dreams 2018, I interviewed two amazing women who do dreams and healing work with their clients. The Video interview is available for your viewing enjoyment at the bottom of the article.

We discussed the power of visitation dreams in our healing process.

Dr. Fariba Bogzaran is a scientist, artist, and author who founded the first certificate Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University in Berkley, CA where she taught for 25 years. Dr. Bogzaran started having precognitive dreams when she was four years of age and shared them with her mother. At a very early age, she also became a spontaneous lucid dreamer. Spontaneous lucid dreaming is characterized by the realization that the currently perceived reality is, in fact, a dream. She describes visitation dreams as, “very powerful experiences.” She goes on to describe one such dream.

“The experience of Lucid Dreaming is as real as a waking dream and often much more enhanced. In one situation, someone had lost her father at a very young age and started dreaming of him in a lucid dream. Little by little, they came closer and closer and finally embraced in the dream. That totally transformed her life.”

Katie Mason is a psychotherapist who uses dream-work in her private practice with clients. Twenty years ago Katie had a dream about her mother two weeks after her mother’s death. She hugged her mother and spoke with her in the dream state. This was extremely helpful for her to move beyond her grief. During the interview, she shared another very interesting dream experience with the live audience.

“Just before my father died I had a visitation dream from my deceased Grandfather. My grandfather came into my dream and told me to send my father the gift I had forgotten to send him. I kept forgetting to send my dad his gift, but after that dream, I sent it right off to him, and it was a good thing I did because he died shortly after the gift arrived.”

Katie’s dream shows another aspect of the importance visitation dreams holds for us.

Both of these fascinating women will be speakers at the International Association for the Study of Dreams in Scottsdale, Arizona starting June 15^th through June 17^th at the DoubleTree Resort, Paradise Valley. During the interview, we discussed the importance of dream visitations as a means of healing our grief. The ability to visit with dead loved-ones as Katie did and receive information that was later validated, is extremely reassuring to those left behind. It can give us a strong sense of comfort. These dreams can also show us that the dead are only gone from our sight in the waking world. And, they can reassure us that they are fine, and miss us as much as we miss them.

Grief is love. Without love, there is no grief. When you embrace grief, and you embrace love.

The death of a loved-one was once described to me by someone who had been addicted to drugs as “a pain and suffering as strong as a drug addict being denied their fix and coming off of it cold-turkey.”

Visiting with a dead loved-one in our dream can be a latent sense of longing for the person.

So, the next time you feel the need to reconnect with your deceased loved-ones, set that intention before bed. Voice your desire out loud or write it into your dream journal. Don’t give up if it does not happen the first time. This is part of dream incubation which is a practiced technique of learning to “plant a seed” in the mind, in order for a specific dream topic to occur, either for recreation or to attempt to solve a problem. There could be any number of reasons your intention is not immediately fulfilled one of which may be dream induced anxiety. The idea of seeing our dead relatives and friends again can cause stress. Continue to incubate your intention. Then, be sure to keep your journal beside your bed so you can write down everything you saw and heard during your dream.

And remember, love is something you can take with you when you die, and that same love will help bring “them” back during times of need or crisis because our loved-ones are only a dream-dimension away.