Lost Loved Ones Visiting in Dreams

I saw a fantastic article on Associated Content about dreams where loved ones are seen in such a vivid way that the dream feels more like a visitation than random subconscious horseplay. I have always believed in this, and I will give a couple of examples from my own life and then attempt to make some points that helped me see "death" as we know it as simply a solid wall of misunderstanding- an incorrect view of reality and existence in general, which each and every one of us must naturally grow out of here or "hereafter".

- The dream about Lance

When I was working for Vignette software here in Austin we had a tragedy in October, 2000. Two young Vignette employees were on their way home in a taxi when the driver inexplicably shot them both. One of them was a work friend of mine named Lance Hughes. Naturally his death was a horrifying shock to friends and family- and though I did not know Lance well I was full of rage and bitterness and had trouble sleeping for weeks afterward.

My personal beliefs are now, as they were then, in line with Christian Science, which teaches that ultimately there is NO parting at all from loved ones, and that death really has no power to greatly affect your life one way or another. This makes sense to people who study CS or similar schools of thought only when you utterly discount the existence of matter, and instead classify it as a totally irrelevant thought construct- a cloud of mental chaos trying to assume solid form for the purposes of imitating the REAL world, which is spiritual, rather than material, and therefore not subject to material laws or limitation.

At the time this knowledge was of little comfort; I had trouble thinking about anything else and it was affecting my work; that is until I had a very vivid and unforgettable dream. In my dream I was at a party, and as I rounded a corner and headed into a room with a fireplace there were three men standing there talking; the one in the center was Lance. He was hale and grinning as usual, and holding a wineglass in his hand. His tone of voice told me he had been explaining something to the two gentlemen and when I entered the room he looked up at me and finished his sentence with "so that's what I've been doing since I quit my job at Vignette."

When I woke up I was thunderstruck. I believe absolutely, that what I heard that night was what I needed in order to find peace- the TRUTH about exactly what Lance experienced. If this world is spiritual, and matter is truly illusion, than death- which, by definition has power ONLY over material circumstance, is rendered unreal and powerless. Therefore I believe that though according to friends, family, neighbors, newspapers, Lance was shot and killed- that is NOT what happened according to Lance. His life simply continued.

Part of what made this dream experience so powerful is that I had been going over and over it in my head, but was unable to find peace, until in that dream Lance shared something that was SO different from the way I was thinking about the situation, that it was like a missing puzzle piece clicking home and setting my mind at ease. This feeling that information came from "outside" myself helped convince me that what I experienced had been a visitation, not just a dream.

- The dream about my Grandfather

Another dream I would like to share is one that I had recently about my Grandfather. In my dream he was looking hearty, and younger, though still certainly recognizable, and swarthier than I had seen him- as though he spent a lot of time outside. Now, certainly dreams of loved ones are very common- but what made this one interesting is that as he was talking to us he mentioned that he had been out boating with my great uncle, Al. My great uncle lived in Florida and was not someone that I saw or thought about very often in my adult life- I hadn't seen Ann and Al in over a decade. Well, I told my Mom about the dream and she said that Al had just recently gone into the hospital for surgery for a blood related issue. As it turned out Al never fully recovered and passed away soon after I had the dream. I shared the dream with his wife Ann and she found it comforting to imagine Al and Papa hanging out together, as they were very close friends.

So now that I've given my examples I just wanted to make a short list of common elements that I have read about in stories like this that I find interesting:
1) the lost loved ones we see tend to always look very familiar, yet free from old age- though not necessarily young. I believe this is because in reality we are "neither old, nor young" as Mrs. Eddy states in the book Science & Health, with Key to the Scriptures.

2) adjacent to point #1 is this: why is it, if you imagine people you grew to know very well, for example, in grade school, you tend to picture them roughly the same age as yourself? For example, in 6th grade at Glenwood Elementary in Chapel Hill I had a crush on a girl named Liz Schoenbaum. Now as a 33 year old adult I KNOW that 6th graders would certainly qualify as small children- yet when I picture Liz it seems very easy for me to imagine her my age- in fact I do it automatically; though the last time I saw her she was 12. Could this perhaps be because we are truly neither old, nor young and when you get to know someone you are getting to know the PERSON and not necessarily the BODY they seem to be exhibiting?

3) if point #2 is true it would help explain another dream phenomenon: often in dreams we can see someone we are totally familiar with transform right before our eyes- a girl may turn into a man, an adult into a child, etc- yet when this happens our idea inside the dream of WHO that person is doesn't change in the slightest! We can't be fooled- it's almost as if all they did was change clothes.

4) my last point would be a meager attempt at tying these things together. If we can see loved ones in dreams why not during the day when we're awake? I believe that is for the same reason that we don't do any other fantastical physical law breaking during the day- superhuman powers and such are reserved for dreams- not simply because they are fantasy, but because our subconscious minds have a MUCH lower respect for the laws of physics and biology than our waking minds do- thus dreams can and often do break these laws. When we wake up, we are surrounded by millions of other people experiencing the same "awake" limitations that we are- and as we all agree to abide by the same limitations, that is what we experience. In dreams we are free of the mass misconception of reality- we are in our own thought bubbles where we make the rules. So I think it is that here, in dreams, when our defenses of the erroneous, illusory material world are at their flimsiest, that it is possible for lost loved ones to communicate with us. The same could be said about near-death experiences- though these are often vastly more realistic than dreams, because the sub-conscious is not actively feeding nonsense into the waking mind.

So to recap I believe telling visits from loved ones in dreams, near death experiences, and the cutting edge science of mind that may soon prove the building blocks of matter to be conceptual, rather than physical, all share kernels of what we will come to know as Truth with a capital T. My final point would be that I do not believe Jesus Christ was a miracle worker, he was a scientist, proving "Life to be deathless, and love to be the master of hate." (Science & Health). In this day and age if a scientist figured out portable cold fusion that everyone could do in their living room... would we build statues and worship the man? Or would we try to learn from him and duplicate his example? Jesus was teaching the highest laws of reality- of putting OFF the material and learning of the spiritual; of God, of Love, of the goodness and fullness of life that we must and will all grow into. Much of his message has been used through the ages for fear mongering and control; but if material reality really IS an illusion... how much longer can it withstand our testing?

And if matter is NOT an illusion... why is modern science constantly poking holes in it, without a single new discovery that provides competing evidence? I believe human evolution is right where it should be, Newton discovered gravity... but the era of his science is slowly coming to an end. The science of Mind, and of Spirit, is what's next- we see evidence of it everywhere- and each day it gets more exciting.