Death in a dream

What the traditions say

The oldest dream manual to survive complete, Artemidorus's Oneirocritica from the 2nd century, treats a dream of your own death with surprising calm. For him, dreaming you were dead was good for the sick, since the dead are sick no more, good for anyone in fear or in a lawsuit, and for everyone else a passage from one state to another, so the unmarried marry and the man at home goes abroad. The Tarot has a similar idea in a picture. The Death card, the skeleton on the horse in the Rider Waite deck, is read in the tradition as an ending that makes room for something else to flourish, and only rarely as a literal one, which surprises most people I have seen draw it.

The folklore version runs by contraries, dream of a death and you will hear of a birth, or a wedding. That is folklore, and I include it because it tells you something about how long people have refused to take this dream literally.

The paperback dictionaries boiled all of this down to transformation, or death and rebirth. The end of a relationship, a job, a stage of life, or a version of yourself you have outgrown. Jungian readings lean on this heavily too, and with reason. Jung saw the psyche as something that dies and is reborn many times in one life, and in that reading a death in a dream marks something in you giving way so that something else can take its place. It is a reading I find persuasive, but I still would not hand it out wholesale before you have told me who or what died and how you felt about it.

Where the dream is of someone who has actually died, there is a separate body of research on dreams in bereavement, and what I have read of it finds that dreams of the dead are common, and that the people who have them often describe them as comforting rather than frightening. I will come back to that, because it is the one kind of death dream where I think the general reading needs the most care.

What a Jungian would ask instead

A Jungian would set the dictionary question aside and ask what the death felt like, because fear and relief point in very different directions even inside the same image. The dream where you watch yourself die and feel a terrible loss is a different dream from the one where you watch yourself die and feel light, and a dictionary has no way of telling them apart, but you do.

And the second question is always who. If it is you, which you? The version in the dream might be younger, or at work, or wearing something you have not worn in years. If it is someone else, what do they carry for you? A dream of a parent dying can be about the parent, or about the part of you that is still their child, and only your own associations can tell those apart.

“Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes.”

C.G. Jung, Concerning Rebirth, Collected Works volume 9 part 1

My own dead, for what it is worth

I had a very real encounter with a recently passed relative of mine which changed my perception of life and death forever. It was not a visit in the way people usually mean that, and I will not say more about it here because it is mine, but what it left me with is this. When a dead relative turns up, in a dream or anywhere else, what I find myself looking for now is their qualities showing up in me, their attitudes and behaviours that I inherited from them that are still affecting me in some capacity. That is a question I can work with, and it is a different question from whether they came back to life. A dream of the dead can be the strangest or the gentlest dream there is, and it does not always behave like a symbol.

Three dreamers, one death

Let me make up three people, because I cannot tell you about real ones and it is the quickest way to show where the lookup fails.

The first dreams his own funeral and watches his colleagues file past. His first association is the job he has been in for eleven years and has been thinking about leaving for three years but has not plucked up the courage to actually go through with. He does not need an entry to tell him what is ending, and he says he knew it before he woke. The dream is either telling him that the part of him that role-played the office job for years is now gone, or it is telling him what will happen to him if he continues.

The second dreams her sister dies, and her sister is alive and well. Her first association is a row they had at Christmas that neither of them has mentioned since. What she writes down, once she sits with it, is the row, and the thing between them that has not been alive since. Her sister's wellbeing never really comes into it.

The third dreams her grandmother, dead four years, is sitting at the kitchen table making tea, and nothing in the dream is wrong at all. Her first association is the smell of the kitchen, and she wakes crying and oddly peaceful. She does not want it decoded and I would not try. What she has is the smell of the kitchen, and a stream of grief that wanted to come out, and if she ever wants to go further, the question I would offer is which of her grandmother's ways she has found in her own hands lately.

Three deaths and three nights, and "it means change" does not do justice to any of them, though I do not think the entry is wrong so much as written for nobody in particular.

Before you look anything up

A fixed symbol dictionary treats a dream image like a word in a foreign language. You look it up and you get the translation. A dream image behaves more like a name than a word. If I tell you my mother's name, a dictionary is useless to you, because the meaning sits in the relationship.

So before you take the transformation reading, write down the plain facts of the dream. Who died, how, who was there, what you felt in the dream and what you felt on waking. Then your first association for the person who died, and for the place. Then the thing you would rather not write. Then look at where those land in your life this week. If something in your life is ending, you will usually find you already knew. If nothing is, write the dream down anyway and let it keep, because they are often early.

If the death is not only in the dream

Two things, and I mean both of them. If you are grieving someone, a dream of them is not a puzzle to solve. Let it be what it was, and write it down if you want to keep it.

And if a dream of death leaves a feeling that is heavy or will not shift, or if the thought of dying has been with you in the day as well as the night, talk to a doctor or therapist. Dreamwork sits alongside that and never instead of it, and the dream will keep until you are ready.

Questions people ask