Like many people, you may have dreamed about people you love who have died, or about dying yourself. While these dreams can be sad or frightening, they don’t have to be. Dreams of death and visits from deceased loved ones are not necessarily about death in the literal sense. To find out what these dreams mean, you need to investigate how you have used the imagery of death in order to say something to yourself.
Dreams are a way of problem solving in our sleep. A dream usually concerns something that happened or was thought about the previous day. We prioritize during the night just like we do during our waking hours. From the hundreds of events that occur in a day, your unconscious will choose the most important and literally “dream up” different possible reactions and solutions.
Dreams give us a marvelous opportunity to tap into our intuition and to be in touch with our whole selves when making decisions. Our dreams can show us how to become more flexible and more imaginative in our responses to the predicaments in our lives.
See Layne’s A Drowning Russian VIDEO.
Recently a client of mine dreamed her young daughter was dying. The dream presented an emergency situation in which she did not react quickly enough to save her daughter. The dreamer woke in a state of panic. But she had felt no panic in the dream!
In this case the dreamer realized her lack of action in the dream mirrored her behavior in waking life. The dream turned out not to be about her daughter, but about her own inner child who was dying. So much worry and stress had built up in my client’s life that the youthful and playful ‘part of her’ was fading away.
“And in life,” I inquired, “would you be at a standstill if your daughter really was dying?”
“Of course not!” she replied.
The dream had served its purpose in seizing the dreamer’s attention. It was time for her to take a vacation and bring back that playful possibility inside her.
So what do our dreams of death tell us? The answer varies, but here are some tools you can use to uncover why you had a dream about death or dying, or why you chose to bring a deceased loved one into your dream on a given night.
Attach your dream to the current issue it is addressing. To help you attach your dream to a current issue you are attempting to resolve, here are the key elements to study and review.
Write down how you felt in the dream. Ask yourself what situation in the last day or two made you feel the same way. Trust your first hunch when coming up with the answer.
Say the dream out loud. Often the dream’s meaning comes to you when you hear yourself say it. We are constantly playing with words and puns in our sleep. For example, if something happened to you yesterday that made you so embarrassed you “wanted to die,” you might dream you are dying!
What are the people, places or things that stand out in your dream? What pops into your mind when you think about these symbols? Who or what in your life is behaving in a similar way?
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