They say we are not supposed to dream of the dead. They say it is because to dream of the dead is to exist at the threshold of an afterlife—the dead speak because they are hungry, or because they are lonely. They say that the recurring appearance of the dead—in dreams—portends an evil that must be warded off by prayer. And where all this fails, they argue on the basis of practicality, because to dream of the dead is to postpone the grief of lost things, to lament what cannot be recovered.
A few nights ago, and a few nights before that, I saw and spoke with a recently deceased mentor and boss, a man who in more than a few ways changed my life. In one version of the dream, I see him with his wife, also deceased. In another, his voice is hoarse, he strains to say something to me, a secret; I have the sense that it is urgent, this message, but I cannot make out the words.
I am not a stranger to dreams. But I have a remote academic interest in them—something along the fields of hauntology and memory studies. I think about certain dreams as metaphor for being haunted. And I think about myself as an involuntary actor in the cinematic horror productions of this night life. There is, for instance, the many times I would see myself in a room, locked up, trying to escape (I often do). There is also the version where I am seated in a test center trying to remember the answers to an exam (I never do). More recently, there’s been the invocation of hearing a message, something crucial from someone who is dead, but I can almost never make out the words. The most common is the one where I lose a very important item, and I search frantically for it. Often times, by some strange mercy, it turns up somewhere, but the exasperation of seeking it out follows me into my waking hours. The arc recurs frequently through my adult life: A misplacement of prized things. But also, a recovery of old & new things.
I do not need dreams to teach me about loss and grief, or about the sense of being trapped in a season - that feeling of confinement often imposed by limited perspective.
There are days I move about the world haunted by everything I feel has been taken from me. Note the word taken. See how it invokes a second player – life as a villain, or if you’re of my mother’s sensibilities, the devil. Surely, the devil.
Lately, I have found myself thinking: what does it mean to dream about the dead as a way to reckon with loss? Not just the loss of life, but of time, of youth—in my case, the self-proclaimed squandering of Kairos moments? I think about the dead as representative of people whose time has gone. And I sometimes think about myself as a relic stuck in a wrong time, or as one who is behind, perpetually trying to catch up: Ever the late bloomer, emerging in a season only to realize that the world appears to have moved on.
Sometimes a dream is not a longing for what is absent, but a memory of it, so that it is not the dream itself that is haunted, but life. Of course there are non-psychoanalytic readings of dreams. Sometimes a dream is the after effect of a bad meal, a virus, an overactive imagination. Sometimes a dream is another thing, a strange non-thing. If you favor a more transcendental approach—a dream can be metaphysical statement, dream as revelation etc.
But this is not a letter about dreams. It is about the dead. How we encounter the dead. How we encounter ourselves in the face of loss. All of which is to say that I think about certain dreams the same way I am think about loss, but my sense of loss is also connected to my sense of perspective. For instance, I tend to grieve the loss of time, though in fact, what I grieve is a version of the life I thought I would have. Loss, in this sense is not what is gone forever, but what has evolved. There is also the loss of relationships—friends, but also romantic interests; that is to say, the loss of men I loved, even though I loved them in a time when I did not even know myself.
What if time takes some things from us so it can give us a more complete version of ourselves?
What if in addition to what is lost, we also think about what we desire, and why we desire what we desire?
What if the goal of this rhetoric—loss and recovery—is not to reclaim the missing object, or to bring back the dead as it were, but to learn and discern what to desire?
I have a special sentiment for people who feel forgotten, or people who feel like they have fallen behind in life. I have myself, season after season, lamented the fraught displacement from feeling like things are not going my way or at my preferred pace, or not even going at all. But as someone who has ‘lost’ in this respect, I have also come into what seems like a thousand new things, so that the boundary lines of being behind or ahead are now so blurred, and all that is left is an unsinkable feeling that things are going exactly the way they were supposed to.
Sometimes I wonder—what if it really is that simple?
As someone who often dreams of loved ones long gone, this was a comforting read. May you be comforted too. Thank you.🤍