Y'all ever have a dream about a loved one you lost?

You fkn bet I do.

Her name was Laurie, and I loved her and she loved me. She was perfect. Faults, baggage and all. We split up after a few years and tried to go our separate ways.

One day I was in a library and was compelled to pick up the fucking obituaries. And there she was. I still don’t know what happened to her, and this was over 15 years ago.

I’ve had relationships since Laurie. I’ve loved again, opened my heart up again. But it’s not the same. I dream about her a couple times a month. Still. When I was at a really low point in my life, I used to dream about her telling me she was waiting for me and to come find her. I almost did it. I spent a lot of time in counseling afterward.

I still think of her. I still miss her. I’m sure a shrink would have a lot to tell me about it.

Yeah. My dad pops up in my dreams quite a bit.

I also had to break ties with my best friend after his alcoholism got really really bad. There was basically nothing I could do at that point and it was affecting me. I was so guilt stricken over abandoning him that I straight up dreamt about him every night for 2 years. Eventually I messaged him to apologise and to see how he was. He was in a program and was doing much better. The dreams stopped immediately. Over the last year or so we've slowly patched together a new sort of friendship. We always used to drink together, so it was odd at first, but now we have something purer and probably more real. Although it's clear that a lot of our friendship was based around getting mutually fucked up.

I had a dream about my friend's dad who died about ten years before the dream. He was a nice guy, sudden heart attack while on a wedding anniversary trip, total shock. It felt like closure. He was coaching basketball. Said "ah, I just do it because I miss my boys, they're all grown up now, it reminds me of when I coached all you when you were kids."

i see my grandpa sometimes, and recently i started seeing my dad again which hadnt happened for a while. I assume i see my grandpa more cause he died when i was an adult and my dad died like 24 years ago and those memories of him are certainly fading.

Usually in my dream i dont know theyre dead, but a couple times i might have been lucid dreaming cause i knew they were dead and was like "wtf how"

Rather often, they typically act as they did irl. I always imagine my grandparents drinking their coffees and sometimes they offer subconscious wisdom, or more likely they're doing their favorite pass time of hanging out at the casino or playing cards or board games with their also dead friends or my great uncles (who usually have good subconscious wisdom for some reason). Mom has her silly misadventures. I don't usually dream of dead pets I've noticed, more people, though I did dream of my sister's long gone dog which was odd.

When mom died and the first night after I was finally able to fall asleep and her being her tradcath self and subconscious knowing this I dreamt first she was big mad she was getting cremated (lady we don't got money, you lucky we buried you at all) and then she was furious that somehow in that death experience pseudo omniscience deal she realized I was one of the things she hated the most and ranted at me being a communist and how dangerous that was. I hid it from her successfully while she was alive, but you can't hide stuff from your memories of the dead, nope.

If ever I go half lucid in a dream, I immediately run/fly out seeking people I've lost. It's a really jarring feeling and I wake up feeling their absence in my chest.

I don't normally dream much about other people anymore. Maybe it's because I've gotten more isolated over the years, but the rare occasions I dream about people, it's usually an immediate family member. A while ago (maybe two or so months ago?) I had a dream that was out of left field.

When I was a kid, I was frequently a loner. Not by choice, but because I just lacked any social skills, confidence, or extracurriculars that gave me a connection to kids my age. This persisted from when I was pretty young up through high school. I never really stopped being weird and most people still thought of me as a net-negative to any social situation, but not all of them. I ended up with a group of friends. Not just people who were my kind of weird (which I was very self-conscious about and essentially avoided like the plague) but more varied. Some theater kids, some athletes, some boys, some girls. In the mornings before the bell rang, as well as during lunch, we'd sit out in this side area between the auditorium and the cafeteria. It was all concrete-floored, partially covered by the sides of the auditorium roof and partially under a covered walkway. There was a picnic bench and two small concrete cubes adjacent to the wall of the auditorium to sit on. That place ended up meaning a lot to me, I think, because it was the first place I ever really felt like I had friends.

In my dream, I was sitting at the bench alone, eating lunch. A friend who I had a crush on for a long time, I mean for years, sat down across from me and started eating with me like it was the most natural thing in the world. I haven't talked to this girl in close to a decade now, hadn't thought about her at all in a long time. I tell her "I'm sorry I acted sort of weird for a while before we ended up losing touch, and I'm sorry I never just let us be normal friends." She tells me it's okay, and that she forgives me. We keep eating. A moment later come two friends of mine who I had been close with a while back. Lost contact with them as well, and was pretty unfairly disappointed in them when I last knew them. They got married the other year, not that I had ever heard anything about it from them. I apologized to them for expecting more than was fair out of them. They accepted, told me it was water under the bridge, and started eating. The four of us were talking amongst ourselves about I don't know what, along comes another friend. I had, at times, been unfair to them, too. Nothing dramatic or out of the ordinary, but I had definite hangups born from insecurity around him. Another apology, another acceptance. This kept going for a while. People I knew would keep joining the group. I would apologize for however I wronged them. They would forgive me, grab a seat somewhere, and talk amongst us. People ended up having smaller side conversations as more people showed up and it felt almost like a big picnic. I knew as I was apologizing that none of this would bring these people back into my life. This quiet lunch on a beautiful afternoon would end, we would go our separate ways. I think somewhere in there, I recognized that it was all a dream. The mass of people became more than just the friends I had lost across the years. It was everybody I had ever wronged in my life. Even strangers I had met only for a minute when I accidentally cut them off or inconvenienced them. Every last mistake was accounted for. The scores had been settled and every debt was freely forgiven. I felt an overwhelming feeling of love. It was the warmest, softest, and kindest sensation I had ever felt, and maybe the first time in my life feeling fully and totally at peace. Like I was enough, and the world was enough.

Soon enough, I woke up. I've never experienced a dream like that in my life. Nothing so vivid or so coherent, or that I felt so deeply. I just had a peace that washed over me. It reminded me of something I heard once from somebody whose thoughts have deeply impacted my own: that all cruelty in the world, even sadism, comes from fear. Fear that we will not be forgiven for the things we have done or the things we might do. It is a belief that there is no escaping judgement and punishment for the things we have done and the things we might do, and that on our deathbeds we will be in agony because of it. That when we die, we will have to pass into the terrifying unknown alone, in pain and fear. And lastly, that in becoming that punishing agony for somebody else, we escape the punishment looming over our own heads, or at the very least that we will not be the only ones punished. This fear of judgement is in everybody, to some extent, and can make all of us cruel, even in small ways. Living with this gnawing fear is what it means to be in Hell. Heaven is something we must build. It is not a place that can be entered by an individual, it must be built by many hands. It is the understanding among people that everybody is human and shares the fundamental human experience: we are small beings, cast into a world that cruelly gifts us with a body that feels pain and wants and needs that can never be done away with, and it will never be our fault. We do not choose our faculties or our environments. None of us do. If you believe that of everybody, and you believe that they think the same of you, it all falls into place. We come to understand that, having felt those pains and injustices, nobody would ever choose to punish each other. It would be like choosing to hurt themselves. The fear melts away, and we feel forgiven. When we feel forgiven like that, we conquer our manic fear of death. When I heard all this, it sounded like absolute woo-woo bullshit to me from a guy I normally thought of as one of the most clear-minded and well-meaning people I had ever seen. I had given it thought, rolled it over in my mind, and decided it made some sense, but was far too sappy and optimistic to be anything real. But it all felt true after that dream. I understood what I think it feels like when you have been forgiven for everything, and it's something I wish for everybody.

I teared up a little bit after the dream. I certainly cried a bit writing all of this out. I hope I didn't sour it with something incoherent at the end, but that's it. That's what it meant to me.

I do, but they are different from my waking memories of them. I tend to remember the bad while awake and the good while asleep regardless of my overall feelings for a person.

For instance, the majority of my memories with my grandma were great ones, but the ones that surface while I'm awake are two single instances when she made comments about our gay uncle-in-law and interracial marriages. When she is in my dreams, it is never in a negative context. Maybe it's because these memories were so at odds with the rest of my experiences of her and the fact that they always pop up when I think of her bothers me.

The same is true of a former roommate who killed himself shortly after moving out of our house. When I think of him, I remember how much of an inconsiderate, jealous, abusive asshole he could be to everyone. When I dream of him, I remember good moments and his generosity when I suddenly needed a new place after unexpectedly becoming homeless. Those moments of generosity were sparingly few and it wasn't him who extended the helping hand when I was down. In contrast to the welcome everyone else gave me, he was generally just an ass though I was no extra burden on the house. I moved in one day before another roommate moved out and borrowed an inflatable mattress from him for a week while I worked out how to replace all the things I lost as a minimum wage worker. My meals for the first couple days were not food I had purchased, but I didn't ask to be included in their dinners or to be supported that way, only a room to rent. I was never late on rent. I was a quiet roommate and contributed to keeping up the place and doing dishes for everyone when they had included me in their meals. He treated me as an inferior the entire time we lived together because he made decent money and thought I was weak for making so little and needing a hand when I was at my lowest. I have nothing good to say about him, but my dreams still think of him fondly.

I'd say my dreams are utopian or idealistic, but they're normally incoherent or nightmares. Brains and how they handle memories are weird.

A lot. Even since I was in school. Its always very non chalant or eerie.

I have dreams where they didn’t actually die in the hospital, and they arrive at home like nothing happened but there’s a tension due to the obvious fact that we all moved on thinking they’re dead.

Sometimes with the added layer that they’re home but everyone knows they’re dead, but no one wants to bring it up.

Yes, I have a lot of dreams with my grandma. I had one where we were traveling internationally together, somewhere she never visited in life. I was trying to rush everything so we could experience it together, because I knew she was really dead and it was just a dream and I didn't have much time, but she would ask me to stop and slow down because she was tired. At first it annoyed me because I wanted to experience things with her and wanted her to see the things she hadn't, but then I accepted she was tired and had her sit down and I just sat down with her and held her. I woke up eventually. I love those dreams because I miss her and love to see her again.

But once I had a dream about an old childhood friend, more of an acquaintance really, but at that age everyone is your friend. His grandma was friends with my grandma so we'd play when they visited each other. I hadn't talked to him, or even heard about him, since we were very little kids. And, anyway, one day I'm like 20 or so and had a dream about him as an adult. Then I came home from university like a week later and I brought up to my mom that I had this funny dream recently where he popped up randomly after so long, and she said he died like a week before I had the dream. Very weird.