Are Dreams of the Dead Rare?

Most people think these dreams are rare.

Many people believe that dreaming of someone who has died is a rare thing. They picture it happening to a few unusual people, perhaps to those who are especially sensitive, or especially sad, or who have a gift for strange experiences. If it happens to them, they keep quiet about it, because they suppose it marks them out.

It is not rare at all. Dreams of people who have died are among the most common dreams after a loss. In surveys of grieving people, a large share say they have had at least one, and many have had several. The reason the belief survives is simple: most people do not talk about these dreams, and many are never remembered at all. A thing that is common but quiet can look rare from the outside, like a night ferry that runs every evening while the whole town is asleep.

I learned this properly in late spring, on a Saturday, when three people in our kitchen turned out to have been keeping the same secret.

Our mother told her dream over the strawberries.

Our mother had come home on the Friday night train, as she does every weekend. On Saturday morning I came back from my bakery shift with flour still in the seams of my shoes, and found her at the sink, rinsing a box of strawberries one by one under the tap.

"I dreamed about her," she said, without turning round. "Is that strange? I thought it might be strange."

She did not need to say who.

In the dream, our grandmother was standing at a ferry rail with her coat buttoned to the chin, holding a timetable folded small, the way she always held them. The ferry was not leaving and not arriving. It was simply out on the water in good weather. Our grandmother pointed at something on the far shore, and our mother looked, but could not see what it was. Then she woke up in her small flat far away, and she said the room had smelled, for a second, of sea air and machine oil.

"I nearly didn't tell you," she said. "I thought you would think I wasn't coping."

My brother, who was eating cereal at the table in his band T-shirt, put his spoon down. "I've had four," he said. "Four dreams. I counted."

Our mother turned round then, with a strawberry in each hand, and for a moment the two of them looked at each other as if they had both bought tickets for the same train and never noticed each other in the carriage.

My brother's friend had dreamed of her father for years.

That evening the band practiced in our garage. The neighbor who keeps bees came out to her hives at the sound of the drums, shook her head kindly, and went back in. At about nine the others left, and my brother's friend stayed behind, waiting for her mother to pick her up.

She was kneeling on the hall floor, fitting a snare drum into its case and fastening the buckles one by one, when she joined our conversation. She had heard most of it through the door.

"My dad comes in dreams," she said. "He has since I was small. He died when I was five, so mostly I don't remember his face, but in the dreams I know it's him. He's usually fixing a bike or driving somewhere. Nothing special happens."

My brother stared at her. They had played in the same band for two years.

"You never said," he said.

"Nobody asked," she said, and fastened the last buckle.

A moment later her mother's headlights swept across the hall ceiling. She stood up, lifted the case by its handle, and went out into the warm evening with a wave over her shoulder.

I think that small exchange in the hall taught me more than any book that spring. These dreams were all around us, in our own house and our own garage, and we had each been carrying ours alone, like passengers on one long night bus who never speak to each other until the driver turns on the lights.

Most dreams leave before we can catch them.

Part of the quiet comes from the way dreams behave. Most of them are forgotten within minutes of waking. A dream is like a radio station heard while driving through hills at night. It is clear for a while, then it fades into hiss, and by the time you reach the next town you could not say what song was playing.

So a person may dream of someone they have lost many times and remember only one of those dreams, or none. They then believe they have hardly dreamed of that person at all. The visits happened, but the timetable was thrown away before anyone could read it.

My brother said he remembered his four only because each one had ended with him waking in the middle of it, once on the stairs and three times in his own bed with the light from the street on the ceiling. A dream that is broken off tends to stay, like the name of a station you read in the very second the train stops.

I had not dreamed of our grandmother yet, or not that I could remember. I said so in the kitchen, and I felt a little left out, as if everyone else had been given a seat on a ferry I had somehow missed. Our mother put a hand on my shoulder and said that perhaps I had, and the dream had simply gone on without me.

The silence around these dreams is a habit, not a rule.

Why do people keep these dreams to themselves? Our mother said she was afraid of seeming unable to cope. My brother said he thought it was a bit embarrassing at sixteen. His friend said no one had asked. None of them said the dreams were frightening.

In many places, and in many families, talking about the dead at breakfast is simply not done. It is a habit, like walking on one side of a station corridor. Nobody wrote the rule down, and nobody remembers agreeing to it, but everyone follows it.

Old stories break that habit all the time. They are full of mothers and sons and friends who come back at night. One of the shortest of them is a folk tale in a German collection that two brothers gathered more than two hundred years ago. I told it that night, after the friend's mother had picked her up, to my brother and our mother at the kitchen table, with the strawberry box empty between us.

Tonight's Story

The tale is called The Little Shroud. A shroud is the white cloth or garment in which a person is laid in the grave.

Once there was a mother who had a little boy of seven. He was so lovely and so kind that nobody could look at him without loving him, and she loved him more than anything in the world. Then he fell ill, quite suddenly, and he died.

The mother could not be comforted. She wept day and night.

Soon after he was buried, the child began to appear at night in the places where he used to sit and play when he was alive. When his mother wept, he wept too. When morning came, he was gone.

Still she could not stop weeping. Then one night he came in the little white shroud he had been buried in, with the wreath of flowers still on his head. He sat down on her bed, at her feet, and said: oh, mother, please stop crying, or I cannot fall asleep in my coffin, because my shroud never dries from your tears, which all fall upon it.

When she heard this, the mother was startled, and she stopped weeping.

The next night the child came again. This time he held a little light in his hand. Look, he said, my shroud is nearly dry now, and I can rest in my grave.

After that, the tale says, the mother gave her sorrow into God's keeping and carried it quietly and patiently. The child did not come again, and he slept in his little bed under the earth.

The tale is so short that I could tell it twice in the time it took the kettle to boil. I did not tell it twice. I let it sit.

The tale is gentler than it first sounds.

When I had finished, my brother frowned. "So it's saying you shouldn't cry," he said. "That's a bit harsh."

I had worried about exactly that. Old tales are short and blunt, like the instructions inside the cover of an old radio, and they leave the reader to supply the softness. But I do not think this one is telling anyone not to grieve. The mother does not forget her son, and she does not stop loving him. What changes is the way she carries her sorrow. At first it pours out of her all night without a pause, so that neither she nor the child can rest. Later she still carries it, but quietly, the way a long-distance traveler carries a heavy bag once she has found the right way to hold it.

Notice also what the tale does not say. It does not say she dreamed. It says only that he came at night, and sat on her bed, and spoke. Many old tales leave that line blurred on purpose. A child at the foot of the bed in the dark could be a dream or something the story wants us to imagine for ourselves, and the teller does not stop to choose.

And the child is not angry. He does not threaten or warn. He is tired, the way children are tired, and he wants to sleep. The second time he comes, he carries a little light. To me, that light is the kindest thing in the whole tale.

Our mother was quiet for a while. Then she said, "When I dreamed of her on the ferry, I woke up and didn't cry. I felt as if she'd shown me something nice and I'd just missed it. I was almost cheerful. I thought that was the strange part."

Comfort is the most common thing people report.

It was not strange either. People who describe dreams of someone who has died most often describe them as comforting. The person looks well, or busy, or content. Sometimes they say only a few ordinary words. Sometimes they say nothing and simply stand at a rail or sit at a workbench. Many dreamers wake with a feeling of having been visited and reassured, even when the waking also brings tears.

Not every such dream is gentle. Some are sad, some are muddled, and a few are frightening, and all of these are normal too. But the gentle kind is common, and it is worth knowing that, because a person who thinks these dreams are rare and strange may also think they must be a bad sign. They are much more like a familiar bus route at night: you have taken it before, other people are on it too, and it goes somewhere you know.

My brother's friend had said her father was usually fixing a bike or driving somewhere. Our grandmother had wanted a screwdriver. Our mother's dream was a ferry in good weather. None of these dreams contained a secret message. They contained a person, doing what that person did.

The house sounded different with four voices in it.

That night, after the story, the house did not feel so much like an empty station. Our mother washed the cups. My brother tapped out a rhythm on the edge of the table with two teaspoons until she took them away from him. I sat in the doorway of the workshop and looked at the stopped clocks.

It occurred to me that we had all been treating our dreams as if they were faults in a machine, small noises we should keep to ourselves until we understood them. They were not faults. They were the machine running as it was built to run.

Across the street, the clock repairer was still at the bench under a lamp, bent over something small. Some of our grandmother's unfinished repairs were on that bench now, carried across the road one box at a time in the week after the funeral. I liked knowing that her work was still ticking somewhere, even if it was in another window.

Before bed, our mother asked me to write the tale down for her, so that she could read it on the train back on Sunday. I wrote it on the back of one of our grandmother's old ferry timetables, because it was the nearest piece of paper, and she folded it small and put it in her coat.

Something to Try Tonight

This is something you can do alone, or with someone in the house, before you sleep.

Turn on one small lamp and switch off the other lights. The lamp is your little light, like the one the child carries in the tale.

Take a piece of paper and write down five ordinary things the person you miss used to do. Not their best moments and not their last ones, only the everyday things: how they held a cup, what they muttered at a stubborn screw, the way they folded a timetable small. Write each one on its own line and read the five lines back once, slowly.

If there is someone in the house you trust, you might read one line to them, or ask whether they have ever dreamed of that person. You may find, as we did, that they have been waiting for someone to ask.

Then fold the paper in half and put it under the lamp. Breathe out slowly three times. Turn off the lamp and let the room be dark.