Dream Visitations
When Spirits Use Dreams to Say, “Hello from Heaven!”
Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of two books, Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com.
The holidays are a time when dearly departed loved ones are at the forefront of our minds. We miss them. We have fond memories of them. We feel the void they have left in our hearts and homes. Even hanging ornaments, setting dinner tables, and buying gifts can trigger a steady stream of thoughts about our loved ones in spirit.
People in spirit recognize that this is a trying time for their surviving loved ones here on the physical plane, so they attempt to contact us to remind us that they exist, they are with us, and they love us. They use numerous methods to communicate their presence, most commonly by sending us signs and signals (after-death communications—ADCs). Still, one key ADC known to millions is a “dream visitation.”
Did you know that dreams are a common means of communication with our loved ones who have crossed over? Too often, we shrug off these meaningful messages from the spirit world as being a meaningless dream. Yet dream visitations are one of the easiest ways for deceased loved ones to convey messages to us. In many cases, we will feel the presence of the spirit visiting us in the dream. And in most cases, they will provide us with an important message to comfort our grief.
According to Bill and Judy Guggenheim, who gave us the term “after-death communication” in their book Hello from Heaven, a dream visitation falls under the category of ADCs. This article provides independent attention to dream visitations because so many people experience the subject, and it has such a grief-comforting impact that it deserves its own analysis.
Millions of people have likely experienced a dream visitation, which is when a deceased loved one visits you while sleeping. These visits are remembered as a dream, hence the name, but they are more accurately a method for getting past your conscious mind. We don’t have an alternative term for “visit from a loved one while sleeping,” so we label these experiences as dream visitations.
In most cases, the dream is extraordinarily vivid and feels like you are in the presence of your loved one, which you are. You often feel a heightened sense of emotion due to the reunion, an emotion that is also recalled in vivid detail. While most dreams usually seem disjointed and filled with fantasy—you’re driving a car one second and riding a horse the next—dream visitations seem authentic, as if your spirit and your loved one’s spirit have met in person. These particular types of dreams feel less like fantasy and more like reality.
One woman told me about her dream visitation from her dog. She said, “It was a couple of days after she passed, and it was so vivid that I remember the details as if it just happened. I was in my office, and like most days when she was alive, she was lying beside me. I was so excited to see her. I got to run my fingers through her fur and give her a hug. The experience was so real to me that I can still feel the sensation of her fur in my hands whenever I think back to that experience.”
It is easier for our loved ones to visit us in our dreams because our attention is withdrawn from our conscious, logical mind, and therefore, it’s not possible to be skeptical or scared. While sleeping, our minds are in the unconscious state, which is our connection to the spiritual realm. It is in this middle space between the physical realm and the spiritual realm that those in spirit can meet with us.
Those who have experienced a dream visitation say that they remember the details of the dream with great clarity many years later. They often remember the dream as if they had the dream the prior evening, even if the dream visitation was twenty or fifty years earlier. They also say that it was unlike most symbolic or metaphorical dreams; their dream visitation was straightforward and clear—their loved one in spirit wanted to comfort them.
Early in my investigation, I interviewed a fifteen-year-old boy whose grandfather visited him in a dream. He told me, “The dream was very clear and in color. After I dreamt about him, I felt like I had just seen him, so he wasn’t really gone. It makes me feel good to know he’s around.”
A common dream visitation scenario is when a loved one in spirit suddenly appears in your dream, and it’s like the two of you are with one another again. Sometimes, you’ll both be talking with your mouths, but occasionally, you’ll notice you are communicating telepathically. Either way, the conversation is usually brief and focused.
Those in spirit generally want you to know that they still exist, that they are happy, healthy, and at peace, and that you don’t need to worry about them. In rare cases, people have been able to ask a question and get an answer, but in most cases, the spirit leaves after they have delivered a simple message.
A Real-Life Dream Visitation from an Afterlife TV Viewer
Here’s an example from an Afterlife TV viewer named Faith, who called into the show to tell her story. When Faith’s friend and classmate, Todd, had been killed in a car accident, she was visited by Todd in a dream. Faith had two similar dreams within days of one another. She said she recalls the second dream clearly, almost forty years later. Faith describes her dream.
“I was out with classmates, mostly Todd’s friends whom I normally didn’t hang out with... I was sitting in a car at a gas station with this group, talking and laughing. The driver had gotten out to pump gas, and all the windows were rolled down. One of the friends saw Todd come around the corner of the station and excitedly tells the group, “Hey, there’s Todd.”
“Everyone was excited to see him, knowing that he’d been gone and we hadn’t seen him for some time. We all start to invite him over with shouts of, ‘Hey, Todd, where have you been?’ and ‘Hey, we’ve missed you.’
“Todd is smiling, kind of waving as he walks towards the car. I’m in the backseat next to the window. Todd walks straight up to me, inches from my face, looks straight into my eyes, and tells me with a smile in his voice, ‘I just came back to tell you I’m okay.’ And with that, he turns and walks away.
“In both dreams, I was out with Todd’s group of friends. Todd appears. Everyone is happy to see him, knowing they haven’t seen him in a while. And each time, he comes directly to me, looks into my eyes, and repeats the same sentence, ‘Just came back to tell you I’m okay.’”
Faith added, “The dreams didn’t scare me. They didn’t strike me as fearful or creepy. After the second dream, I felt I was meant to share the dreams with his friends, our mutual classmates. And once I did, I no longer had any more dreams [of Todd].”
How to Identify a Dream Visitation
It's simple to identify a dream visitation. These are dreams that people remember in precise detail, often with vibrant colors. A deceased loved one visits you. Sometimes, they talk to you, usually to say something that comforts your grief. Other times, they smile, but the message that they’re okay is still evident from their smile and appearance. You might even get to hug them. Most people who have dream visitations wake up feeling like it really happened, even if they don’t share their dreams with others. These dreams are also clearly remembered years later as if they occurred the night prior.
This isn’t to suggest that everyone knows their dream visitation is real. Some people unfamiliar with the afterlife think their dream is their imagination gone wild, even if it felt real to them. I once told a group of barbers at my barbershop about dream visitations when one guy said, “My father came to me in one of those dreams. It felt real, but I woke up thinking it was just a silly dream.”
In my observation, the messages from people in spirit during dream visitations mirror the messages we get from mediums at the end of readings after the evidential messages are provided. The spirit typically conveys the following meaningful yet nonevidential messages:
a) I’m still here.
b) I’m okay (not suffering, not ill, not injured).
c) I’m happy.
d) I’m watching over you.
e) I love you.
Most dream visitations provide some or all of these messages.
As I mentioned earlier, the dream visitation phenomenon may not be a dream at all. It might be an experience of our consciousness linking with a departed loved one’s consciousness in some alternate dimension. We may interpret it as a dream because our human mind has no other way to translate the experience, so our best description for these visitations is that they’re dreams.
Like many afterlife experiences, dream visitations are spontaneous, meaning they’re not something we can predictably make happen. It’s possible that setting the intention to have a loved one visit you during the dream state (requesting that your loved one visit you while sleeping) can be effective. Nevertheless, despite dream visitations occurring spontaneously, plenty of people have had more than one, while others have never had one.
If You’ve Never Had a Dream Visitation
Dream visitation is an experience that is vicarious for me in my investigation, possibly because I don’t typically remember my dreams. From what I’ve learned interviewing many people who have had one, I’m led to believe that if I did have one, I probably would recall it the next day.
Once, on the edge of falling asleep, I saw a person yelling my name as his face quickly moved toward me. But someone screaming “Bob!” doesn’t qualify as a dream visitation, so I don’t consider it one. I would have needed to identify the person and feel like he was visiting me. The dream would also need to feel comforting, even if nothing were said, like my friend's dream visitation from her dog above. Just yelling my name didn’t feel comforting. It was more of a “Holy crap! What was that?” kind of experience.
I don’t feel bad that my loved ones in spirit haven’t come to me in a dream. Since I don’t dream the way some people do—meaning, I don’t typically wake up remembering my dreams—I might not be wired in a way that makes dream visitations possible. That’s okay because there are plenty of other methods of communication I can have, including mediumship, after-death communications, spirit contact through hypnosis, spirit artistry, and even spirit writing.
A woman once asked me why her husband came to her children in dreams but not her. I suggested that it’s possible that not having a dream visitation would lead her to one of these other experiences that might be more beneficial to her. It gives me inner peace to trust that we are having—or not having—the experiences that are leading us in the direction that is best for us. It’s possible that I may not have used my skills as a private investigator to investigate life after death for all these years if I had experienced a dream visitation after my father died.
If you’ve never had one, this might be one possible reason. Perhaps you are meant to have other experiences. On the other hand, I know lots of people who had their first dream visitation later in life. Just because you’ve never had one doesn’t mean you won’t. I’m certainly open to experiencing this experience if my brain has the ability (hint, hint to my loved ones in spirit).
Final Thoughts
If this is an experience you’d like to know, I recommend inviting your loved ones in spirit to visit you in a dream during sleep. Tell them it’s a holiday gift they can still give you.
If you’ve been reading my articles or watching my videos for months or years, you have a pretty good understanding that our deceased loved ones are around us during the holidays. As I often do, I encourage you to talk right out loud to them, preferably while no one else is around. I often do this without needing any response from them, but if you need a response, make it easy. Ask for the lights to flicker or a horn to sound. Maybe have a cardinal show up in your window. Please don’t ask them to jump through hoops. A simple hello from heaven is enough.
If you’ve had a dream visitation or two, tell us all about it in the comment section. I’d love to hear about it if you get one after reading this. Dream visitations are real. They are one of the miracles of life that remind us that our consciousness survives death. Sharing your experience in the comments will help other people open their minds to them, possibly to the point where new people will also have this life-changing experience.
I send you love,
Bob
Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of two books, Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com. His newest venture is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.
I recently wrote a comment about the passing of my son, Ben, to suicide in 2002. The prior year, he had spiraled into a menacing mental illness that included hearing voices and having violent thoughts. It was traumatic for me, as his mother, because he had always been a gentle, funny soul with loads of friends. With that said, I had my first dream visit from Ben about 6 weeks after he passed. I remember it vividly. He told me he was alright. In the dream state, I panicked “It didn’t happen!” I cried - there was still time to “save” him. Ben was radiantly healthy in this visit, sitting cross-legged (which he wasn’t limber enough to do when here in the flesh). His eyes were loving and gentle as he said, “Mom, it DID happen...but I need you to know that I’m okay!!” It was short and sweet. It also helped me think of him, in the afterlife, as whole and healthy - not the shattered, struggling and ill teen OR how I’d found him. In another dream, months later, he responded to my sorrowful question of whether I was a good mother? He appeared long enough to hug me and say, “Mom, you were the air in my tires!” - which was hilarious and typical Ben humor. I woke up laughing with my arms circled in the air, forming a hug. Ben has helped me along in my spiritual growth. I have grown in ways I doubt would have happened otherwise. Thank you for your articles.
I've never had a dream visitation that I can recall even though I set my intention to recall such a visitation if it happens. I don't typically recall my dreams so think my departed loved ones know to visit me in other ways and they do (leaving objects in my path, sending birds and dragonflies and hummingbirds my way, playing songs that remind me of them exactly when I am thinking about them, turning on and off battery-operated flickering candles, etc.). Sometimes, my mom visits me when I meditate. So thankful that consciousness survives death and we can communicate with our departed loved ones!!!