The toll for grieving is paid at night when your dreams come calling to pay up for every emotion you put off feeling until later, every thought that misfired, every life adjustment that needs to be made. Your life is going on without your loved one, and you grieve because you loved them. Grief is the price, in that sense, and on my podcast we’ve explored the spectrum of grief dreams and brought forward tender, insightful stories about the dreams that guided our guests (and ourselves) through the grieving process. I’ll give you the rundown in a moment.
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First, though, when the dreams are intense after you’ve lost someone, that’s not your mind torturing you. That’s your mind doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: working layer by layer through the loss, until you can carry it differently than you did at the start. Your dreams carry the burden with you, helping you to remap your world and yourself to adjust to life without your loved one. It’s hard. It hurts. It’s your dreams doing their job. That fact emerged time and again in our podcast interviews. Just get through the process and things get better or at least change.
Grief dreams are some of the most misunderstood ones I encounter. A mistaken assumption I encounter is that these dreams are just the brain recycling memories. They’re not. Grief dreams are active processing — your unconscious running scenarios, testing your relationship with the loss, searching for what it needs in order to move forward, and rewiring neaurologically around what’s missing from your life.
What grief dreams actually do
The unconscious mind creating the dreams that hit the grief hard has a specific job: update the internal model of your world to reflect that this person is gone and figure out what that means for who you are now.
That job is hard, and it takes time. Dreams are how that work gets done when your waking defenses are down. You can spend all day keeping busy, staying logical, telling yourself you’re fine. At night, the story you haven’t let yourself feel in full comes back.
On the Dreams That Shape Us, Maureen Boyd Biro shared something that illustrates this exactly. Her mother had Alzheimer’s for sixteen years. Maureen’s dreams didn’t let her look away from what her mother was experiencing inside the illness — they gave her direct access to it through imagery that would have been impossible to arrive at through rational thought alone. Listen to Maureen’s episode: “The Very Thought of You”
The dreams that companion you through loss
Not all grief dreams are the same. There’s a spectrum, and where a dream sits on it tells you a lot about where you are in the process. Some grief dreams are raw replay — the person is there, alive, and then the dreamer wakes and has to lose them all over again. Those dreams are brutal in the moment, but they’re not stuck or pathological. They’re the unconscious revisiting the loss because it hasn’t finished processing it yet.
Georgia’s story from Season 4 of Dreams That Shape Us is a good example of confrontational grief dreams. She lost her father suddenly in childhood, and the grief didn’t get fully felt — it got managed and set aside. Her dreams eventually wouldn’t let that arrangement stand. “Coming Back to Love” is one of the most honest accounts of that process I’ve heard.
Mary Jo Heyen, in one of the most moving episodes we’ve done, talked about a series of three dreams that helped her find pockets of grief she didn’t even know she was carrying. Once she could feel it, she could heal it. “Dreams Never Abandon Us in Our Grief” — that title says everything.
When the dead show up
The most asked-about grief dream is the one where the person you’ve lost appears and it feels completely real — not like a dream at all. These dreams are the most likely to be mistaken as visitation dream and likely : the unconscious mind creates every character in your dreams, including the dead ones. That doesn’t mean the encounter isn’t real or meaningful. It means the unconscious is doing something specific with that person’s image — bringing them back for a reason.
Laurel’s story in “Love, Loss and Everlasting Life” is the clearest example I know of the unconscious holding a relationship in a form that could survive death. She and her husband met in their dreams when they were apart in life. After he died, they kept meeting. She knows it’s his spirit visiting her.
Christian Gerike told us about the dream he had the morning his wife Suzanne crossed over after a long journey with Parkinson’s. “Always Run in the Direction of Your Dreams” is the episode you have to catch you’ve ever had a dream like that and didn’t know what to do with it.
What to do with a grief dream
The worst thing you can do with a grief dream is dismiss it. Instead, write it down. Date it. Notice what feelings came with it — not just the content but the emotional residue you woke up carrying. That’s often more informative than the imagery itself. Then ask the question that drives all good dreamwork: what does this remind me of in my waking life right now?
A night or two after my father-in-law crossed over I dreamed about finding a dog in a parking lot and thinking I had to find it a home. After picking it up I see in its eyes and feel my FIL looking back at me as if his spirit had reincarnated in the dog. The dog then talks human language and says something to the effect of “you can do this.” In the context of wanting to find the dog a home, it means find a home within myself for the influence the man had on me. After journaling the dream I typed a description of the dog into a search engine, not expecting anything to come close to the distinctive features of the young dog’s face, and the first results pegged it so well. That screenshot is lost, but see the pic at the bottom. It comes closest.
Your dreams aren’t cruel. They don’t keep circling grief to hurt you. They circle it because they know you can carry more than your waking self believes — and they’re trying to show you.
The Dreams That Shape Us podcast is hosted by J.M. DeBord (RadOwl) and Steven Ernenwein. Find it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or browse episodes at dreamsshapeus.com.
The DREAMS 1-2-3 method gives you a systematic way to work any dream — including the ones that won’t let you go. Start here.
About the Author
J.M. DeBord — known online as RadOwl — has published over 25,000 dream interpretations at r/dreams, Reddit’s largest dreaming community, which he has moderated since 2014. He is the author of DREAMS 1-2-3: Three Steps to Interpret Dreams and The Dream Interpretation Dictionary. Recognized by the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Former dream expert-in-residence at Canyon Ranch Spa Tucson. Featured in The Guardian and a recurring guest on Coast to Coast AM.
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