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DREAMING WITH THE DEPARTED

By Robert Moss

Many of us yearn for contact with departed loved ones. We miss them; we ache for forgiveness or closure; we yearn for confirmation that there is life beyond physical death. This is one of the main reasons why people go to psychic readers.

   Here’s an open secret: we don’t need a go-between to talk to the departed. We can have direct communication with our departed, in timely and helpful ways, if we are willing to pay attention to our dreams.

   We meet our departed loved ones in our dreams. Sometimes they come to offer us guidance or assurance of life beyond death; sometimes they need help from us because they are lost or confused, or need forgiveness and closure. Dreams of the departed help us gain first-hand knowledge of what happens after physical death.

    One of the cruelest things that mainstream Western culture has done is to suggest that communication with the departed is either impossible or unnatural.  There is nothing spooky or “supernatural” involved, though these experiences take us into realms beyond physical reality.

   The intimate connection between dreams and the departed is embedded in our language. The English word “dream” and the German word “Traum” are both related to the Old Germanic word draugr, which means a visitation from the departed.

   The easiest way for the departed to communicate with the living is through dreams -though sometimes the departed, as well as the living, fail to realize this. For once, Hollywood got this right. In the movie The Sixth Sense a psychically gifted young boy can see and speak with the departed. He plays counselor to a man who has died, is initially confused about his situation, and then dismayed that he cannot talk to his wife. The boy instructs the dead man, "Speak to her in her dreams, only then will she hear you".

   In most dreams, the departed appear to be living, and very often the dreamer is unaware that the person he or she encounters is “dead” until after waking. The reason is that the departed are indeed alive, though no longer in the physical realm.

    The departed may appear as the dreamer remembers them from their last days of physical life, especially in the first dream encounters. But over time, it is quite common for the departed to alter their appearance, to shrug off signs of age and bodily ailments, and to present themselves as healthy and attractive. People who died in later years frequently reappear looking around 30 years old.

   After my father’s death in 1987, he appeared repeatedly in my dreams to offer counsel to the family, bringing specific and practical information to which I did not have access in waking life. For example, he gave me the name of the realtor on the other side of the Pacific – someone otherwise unknown to me – who moved with great speed and humanity (once we contacted him because of the dream) to help my mother sell her home and resettle in a community where she spent some of the happiest years of her life. My father also made a happy dream visit to one of my daughters, who bitterly regretted never having known him in physical life; he showed himself as a handsome horseman, about 30 years old, and took her riding. Through many dream encounters with my father, I was vividly reminded that a departed loved one can truly play “family angel”.

   After his death, my favorite professor from my undergraduate days in Australia began to appear in my dreams as a different kind of history teacher, instructing me that each of us belongs to a family of personalities in different times and dimensions whose dramas are being played out now.

. I have been dreaming of departed people all my life, and have worked with thousands of dreams of the departed shared with me by others. While the departed person in some of these dreams may be an aspect of the dreamer’s own personality or genetic inheritance – or a mask for a messenger from the deeper Self – the great majority of these dreams appear to involve transpersonal encounters.

   I have observed that there are three main ways in which the departed interact with us in dreams: 

1. We discover that the departed are still around.

 “The dimension that separates the living from the dead is exactly as wide as the edge of a maple leaf,” said Handsome Lake, the Seneca Indian prophet.

    Quite frequently dreams reveal that the departed are present because, quite simply, they never left. A California woman dreamed she entered her living room and found her departed boyfriend on the sofa watching, TV. Surprised, she asked what he was doing there. He responded, “I’m just watching TV”. He did not seem to be aware that he had died.

    The departed may linger because they have unfinished business, or wish to act as guide and protector to the family, or are attached to people and places they loved in waking life, and this may be a perfectly happy situation for a year or two.

    But there comes a time when our departed need to move on, for their own growth, and so they do not become a psychic burden to the living.

   Because our society does a poor job in preparing people for the afterlife, many people who have passed on do not know they are dead, and hover in a limbo close to familiar people and places on this Earth. After death, we continue to be driven by our ruling interests, appetites and addictions. Some of those who have died but not truly “passed on” continue to try to feed their cravings via the living. You don’t need to be especially psychic to notice that in a certain kind of bar, “dead” barflies outnumber the living ones.

  When the departed remain earthbound, the effects are unhealthy both for those who have died and those among the living to whom they are connected. When the dead are enmeshed with the living, the result is mutual confusion, loss of energy, and the transfer of addictions, obsessions and even physical ailments from the departed to the person whose energy field he or she is sharing.

    Helping the departed may involve a loving dialogue, a simple ritual of honoring and farewell, and invoking spiritual helpers. As we become active dreamers, familiar with the geography of the afterlife, we may find we are called on to provide personal escort services and help to instruct some of our departed on their options on the other side. William Butler Yeats noted quite accurately that “the living can assist the imaginations of the dead”.  

2. The departed pay us a visit 

Most people who remember dreams can recall one in which someone on the other side made a phone call, sent a letter, or simply turned up at the door or the bedside. Our departed return to us in dreams for all the reasons they might have called on us in physical life – including the simple desire to tell us how they are doing and see how we are coping - and for larger reasons: to bring emotional healing, to bring us helpful information, to instruct us on life beyond death and the reality of worlds beyond the physical.

    Our departed may come visiting to offer or receive forgiveness. They may come to show us how they are doing on the other side.  

    Our departed can be excellent psychic advisers when they achieve clarity on the other side and are aware that they are not confined to the rules of space and time.

    Our departed may come as health advisors and family counselors. My friend Wanda Burch had received many dreams containing possible health advisories, but was finally driven to seek medical attention when her deceased father turned up in her dreams in a doctor’s white coat and yelled at her, “You have breast cancer!” Her father’s dream intervention helped put her on the path of healing and recovery beautifully described in her book She Who Dreams.

   Our departed may visit us in dreams to help us prepare for our own deaths and reassure us that we have friends on the other side. 

3.       In dreams, we travel to realms of the departed 

In our dreams, we are released from the laws of physical reality, and travel into other dimensions, including environments where the departed may be living. Through dreams of this kind, we can begin to develop a personal geography of the afterlife, which will be vastly enriched when we learn the art of conscious dream travel, which is at the heart of my own teaching and practice.

   In my workshops, I often invite participants to focus on a dream or memory of a departed person and make it their intention to journey – with the help of shamanic drumming – to seek timely and helpful communication with that person and to learn about the environment where that person is now living. From these journeys, we have collected multifarious and fascinating details of reception centers, transition zones, places of recovery and further education and communications arrangements on the other side. We have learned that more than one vehicle of soul survives physical death, and each has a different destiny. We have explored many afterlife locales shaped by human imaginations and collective belief systems.

    There is a long pedigree for experiences of visionary travel of this kind. Across ages and cultures, most human societies have prized informed knowledge about the afterlife, and the travel maps that have come down to us in scripture and literature are most often the product of dreams and visionary experience.

   I don’t think it is possible to overstate the importance of developing first-hand knowledge of the afterlife. If we know, as a matter of direct experience, that there is life beyond death, we are likely to approach the choices and challenges of our regular lives.

 with greater clarity and courage. If we are aware of the conditions of the afterlife, we are less likely to become stuck or confused when we leave our bodies behind.    

    If we are going on a journey, it is useful to have a map. In preparing for death, many cultures have attributed huge importance to receiving accurate maps for the soul’s journey, with directions on how to deal with gatekeepers and challenges along the way. The trouble with old maps is that they may be hopelessly out of date or – worse – may deliver you into a stale collective situation where you do not really want to be. So where do we get an up-to-date map? Through dreaming, and conscious dream travel.

    The Lakota say that the path of the soul in dreams is the same as the path of souls after death. I believe this is exactly right. Our dreams will show us, and our departed loved ones, the way.

Further reading: Robert Moss, Conscious Dreaming, chapter 7; Dreamgates Part III.; The Way of the Dreamer (video) tape 5, “Dreaming with the Departed”.

[12/30/03]

Of Special Interest

The Dreamer's Book of the Dead
by Robert Moss