Can our deceased loved one really communicate with us through visions, visitations and dreams?
A favorite comedy of mine is the movie Ghost Town. This delightful and quirky love story stars Ricky Gervais as a misanthrope dentist undergoing a routine colonoscopy who dies for seven minutes. Revived, and now living in a liminal place between the worlds of the living and the dead, he is able to hear and see the ghosts of the dead who remain invisible and inaudible to the living. These ghosts pursue him relentlessly, pleading with him to tie up their loose ends.
Do our dead loved ones return to us in our dreams?
A father yearns to let his widow know where their child’s teddy bear has fallen. A mother ghost desperately wants to tell her daughter about the letter she wrote that remains hidden under her daughter’s doormat. Gervais initially resists helping these ghosts fulfill their final requests, until he realizes that doing so will enable them to fully enter the world beyond and leave him behind in peace.
Do our dead loved ones return to us in our dreams? Can they really pass on messages to us through visions or visitations? If asked if I believe it’s possible, I would say yes.
History shows I am not alone. Ancient cultures like Egypt and China, and more contemporary traditions like the Native American, speak of messages delivered from beyond via dreams or visions. Robert Moss, author of several books on dreams, relates that many Icelanders name their babies after dream-like visits from dead relatives or close friends seeking namesakes.
Ancient cultures like Egypt and China, and more contemporary traditions like the Native American, speak of messages delivered from beyond via dreams or visions.
Within the Jewish tradition, a story is told in the Talmud about a man in Rabbi Judah’s neighborhood who died and left no one behind to mourn for him. For seven days (known as shiva, the first period of mourning), Rabbi Judah took it upon himself to bring a group of 10 men to this dead man’s house and mourn for him there as per the custom. At the end of seven days, the deceased appeared to Rabbi Judah in a dream, saying, “May your mind be at rest, for you have set my mind at rest.”
Christianity has its own rich traditions of messages delivered via dreams, often by guiding angels; perhaps the most well-known example is in the book of Matthew: “When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’” (Matthew 2:13)
Over the years, many have confided to me their stories of dreams, visions and visitations from the dead.
As a rabbi and a chaplain, I hear the usual things one confides to one’s spiritual leader: loves and losses, joys and disappointments, failures and successes. Over the years, many have confided to me their stories of dreams, visions and visitations from the dead. The stories they relate are mystical and loving and provide them with comfort.
One woman told me that after her mother died, she was sitting in her living room and felt her mother walk into her home, walk over to her, and tell her that she was doing okay. Her sister, to whom she told the story, reported having the same experience. Both were extremely comforted by their mother’s appearance and felt blessed and grateful for the experience.
While some people are eager to share their experiences with me, others proceed cautiously, fearful I may discount them or consider them crazy. I do neither. I only wish that I, too, would have a similar experience, that I, too, could hear from my loved ones beyond to know that they were okay.
Some years ago I served as a rabbi at a congregation in Manhattan, where I befriended a small woman with puffy gray hair who every day visited her husband in a nursing facility. For months he lay in bed unable to communicate; it was hard to tell if he even knew his wife was present. Yet she sat with him, talked to him, and fussed over him; he was her life. They had always done everything together, and his illness could not stop that devotion.
I believe that as her soul departed this world … his soul decided to join her soul on their journey home.
Six months into this routine, she had a stroke, was admitted to a hospital, and died within three weeks. The morning of her funeral, at which I was officiating, I received a call from the funeral home saying that this woman’s husband had died in the middle of the night, and they were now preparing for a double funeral.
Could this man, even in his uncommunicative state, sense his wife’s absence in the world? Did she come to him in a dream, a vision or a visitation? I’ll never know, but here’s what I believe. I believe that as her soul departed this world, it stopped by his soul to say goodbye, and his soul decided to join her soul on their journey home.
