Sleeping with ghosts: are our dreams haunted?
I can remember the first dream I had about my dead mum. It had taken a surprisingly long time for her to make an appearance; months, I think, after I’d lost her to cancer in 2017. I’d been waiting for her every night, before closing my eyes.
Please forgive me, as I’m about to break the “never talk about your dreams; no one cares” rule. In the dream, I was in the garden of a stately home. It was a summer’s day. I heard chanting, and looked over to see a large group of people dancing in a circle. I’m not sure how exactly, but in the dream it was clear to me that this was a Jewish folk dance. In the middle of the circle was my mum, looking beautiful. The last time I’d seen her alive, her big, hazel eyes were sunken. Her hair had been thinning, and her once strong shoulders had been slight, almost like a child’s. But here – in the dream – she was Classic Mum; fat, golden, glowing.
I walked towards the circle, and she appeared next to me. She wrapped me in a tight hug that smelled like the cleanest clothes on earth, and said, “I love you so much.” And then, as in every story written by a lazy schoolchild, I woke up. I was smiling, and almost relieved. One that she’d finally bothered to show up, and two that she looked well, and happy. Because, whether a “visitation dream” (as it’s known by psychologists) is a genuine glimpse into an afterlife, or just the self-soothing of the grieving mind, I was certain I was going to have one. I’d been dreading seeing my mum as she was when she was ill; skeletal, colourless, and obscured by tubes and whirring medical machines. Thinking about her like that, even three years on, leaves me feeling emotionally winded.
Literature is full of visitation dreams. The ancient Greeks and Romans were particularly obsessed with the paranormal side to sleep. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles is visited by his recently deceased best bud (slash lover) Patroclus, who begs the grief-stricken Achilles to hurry up and bury him, already. Likewise, in Virgil’s Aeneid, Trojan prince Hector appears to Aeneas in a dream, and warns him to get the hell out of Troy, before the city is sacked by the Greeks. In Greek mythology, the god of the dead (Thanatos) and the god of dreams (Hypnos) are brothers.
Moving forward in history, you’ve got Shakespeare’s take on the trope, with Hamlet’s dead father appearing to Hamlet. Then, in Dickens, you have the whole of A Christmas Carol, and its cast of visiting phantoms.
In ancient China, dreams were also seen as oracular and laden with meaning. Chen Shiyuan’s sixteenth century encyclopaedia of dream interpretation, Wandering Spirits, proposes the idea that the dead communicate with us through our dreams.
The common thread in all literary visitation dreams is the idea that the dead have something to say to us. They have unfinished business, a warning, or a request. When my mum was pregnant with my sister, my dad’s mother – who had recently died – appeared to her in a dream. She told my mum to call my sister Ruth, which she did. This has always seemed, to me, very prophetic and Biblical. Although it was handy that my mum happened to like the name Ruth, and had her dead mother-in-law requested that she name her baby “Dorcas”, I somehow doubt my parents would’ve gone along with it so willingly.
Since the first dream about my mum, I’ve had a handful of others. She’s always looked well in them. This is quite surprising to me, as I would’ve thought the trauma of seeing her at her most ill would be playing out again and again. Sometimes the visitation dreams are hazy and hard to remember though, and I’m just left with a sense of having seen my mum; a dream hangover that can last a whole day, eking out the emotions I felt, in bursts of déjà-vu.
Perhaps we see our dreams as a potential place to meet up with the dead, because sleeping is – in itself - so much like dying. Or at least how we imagine dying might be. In fact, one theory for the cause of “hypnic jerks” (that thing when you’re about to fall asleep, then suddenly jolt awake) is that your brain thinks you’re dying, so makes sure you’re not. It stands to reason that if there’s a crack in life through which we can see death, it’s our dreams.
And visitation dreams often fall under the category of what Carl Jung called “big dreams”. These are the emotionally explosive ones; those that make such an impression that we remember them for the rest of our lives.
I still go to sleep every night hoping that my mum might visit. Hoping, even more so, that she might be able to engage in a deep conversation, or give me a tangible piece of advice. If there’s one part of her illness I look back on willingly, it’s when she came out of a two week medically induced coma. A place potentially full of death-touching dreams.
“Where were you?” my brother asked her.
“I was everywhere,” she said.