I’ll first point out that many of those who believe they’ve had contact with their deceased loved ones in dreams remember these encounters as being much more vivid than an ordinary dream, to the point where they often don’t think they should be called “dreams” at all. “I was asleep,” says one such experiencer, “but I was not dreaming.” This man says he encountered his deceased daughter in a place “beyond” dreaming and that leaving it felt like the opposite of waking from a dream. The realm where they met “was like being in the middle of eternity.” This feeling of a hyper-real dream is not in itself proof of anything, but it is one small piece of evidence that the process that creates these dreams of after-death contact may not be entirely the same as the process that creates our normal experiences during sleep.
As with apparitions, stronger evidence for survival is offered by dreams that happen before the death is known, provide information the dreamer wouldn’t otherwise have had, and/or happen to more than one person at a time. Let’s look at some examples that fit both of these last two categories.
A month or two after his father’s death, Robert Waggoner had multiple dreams in which his father was showing him a suit in his (the father’s) closet, apparently wanting Robert to get something important out of the pocket. Waggoner didn’t want to bother his mourning mother about the matter, but when he heard from his niece that she had also had a dream about his father wanting her to get something out of the closet, he decided to investigate. Even though much of his father’s clothing had already been donated to charity, there were one or two suits left, and in one of their pockets was discovered a whole set of cherished family photos.
In a case collected by Dianne Arcangel, two people who had never met both had repeated dreams of the same deceased person, a man named Murphy who had owned a vacuum cleaner shop. He had been a mentor to one of them and a father or stepfather to the other. Both of them described the same setting in their repeated dreams: a house in oddly vivid/fluorescent colors with a picket fence and a sign in the yard that read, “At Peace with Jesus.” Furthermore, they both saw Murphy standing on the sidewalk with the sign to his left. The dreamer who’d been mentored by Murphy, a man by the name of Charles Vance, says that Murphy repeatedly asked him to tell his widow to look at a specific location in their house—“in the hall, at the dead end, just south of the bedroom to the right of the light socket”—because he’d left something inside the wall there. When Vance finally got up the courage to share this message with Murphy’s widow, she opened the wall in that location and discovered a stash of thousands of dollars that no one knew Murphy had ever had. Besides being a tandem dream that provides new information, this dream also comes to a bystander, someone who was not a family member of the deceased and was not the primary intended recipient of the information communicated.
There are even tandem dreams that demonstrate some level of interactivity and the evolution of the deceased’s consciousness through time. In another case collected by Arcangel, the deceased demonstrated evolution of consciousness by the adoption of a new strategy in pursuit of his goal. A woman named Debra dreamed of her deceased stepfather coming to say goodbye. When she told her mom about the dream, her mom “became very pale, saying, ‘I dreamed about him too, but I told him I was afraid. I said, ‘Go tell Debbie.’”
Interactivity and the adoption of a new strategy by the deceased is also evident in the following case collected by David Ryback and described in his book Dreams That Come True. A single mother and her two children (one of whom was Ryback’s informant for this case) were all ill and needed the help of the mother’s parents to move to a warmer climate. However, the mother and her father were in one of their frequent periods of not speaking to each other, and so she refused to ask him for help. Then one night she dreamt that her deceased grandmother came to her door and said, “Bill [the father] will help, if you just let him know. Call him.” The young woman refused, insisting her father would have to make the first move. She woke up thinking how weird it was that her grandmother had referred to her dad as “Bill” instead of “Wilbur,” the name she’d always called him while she was alive.
A couple days later, she got a letter from her dad, asking her to call. They patched up their relationship, and both the woman’s parents came to help her move. On the road to their new home, she asked her mom whether her grandmother had ever used the name “Bill” to refer to her father and learned that she had started calling him this about three months before she died. The young woman then decided to tell her mother about her dream. When she did, she discovered that, on the same night, her father had also had a dream visit from her grandmother, where she told him it was urgent he contact his daughter and said it was up to him to make the first move, because his daughter wouldn’t do it. That’s when he got up to write the letter his daughter soon received.
One final point with regard to dreams: as with living people who remember appearing to others during out-of-body experiences, there are living people who remember appearing to others in dreams and whose appearances have been confirmed by the dreamers in question. For example, dream researcher Fariba Bogzaran reports that she intentionally set out to dream of visiting an old friend who lived in another country and whom she hadn’t seen in almost 20 years. She succeeded in dreaming about the old neighborhood where they’d grown up together, and then she decided to try making her way to her friend’s new house, which she’d never visited in waking life. “I find the street where she lives and walk towards her house,” says Bogazaran. “The color of the door is pale blue. I ring the bell and she opens the door. I am overjoyed to see her. We cry and hug each other with overwhelming emotion. Embracing her feels absolutely real. The intensity of the experience wakes me up.” The next morning, Bogzaran wrote a letter to her friend with a detailed description of the dream. On the same day, her friend wrote her own letter, describing her own dream that included greeting Bogzaran at the front door.
Dreams like the above show that it’s possible to interact with other people’s consciousness through dreams and make it all the more plausible that dreams of the deceased are sometimes genuine communications.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.
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