Dreams and the Underworld

[PPI Karl]

I know it's a normal part of the grief process to have intensely realistic dreams about the recently deceased, but I was curious to know whether any of you have ever believed that you're really  in communication with the dead in your dreams--either because your subconscious mind is more connected to the spirit realm, or because the spirits of the dead reach out to you and help you to connect to their realm.

Ordinarily, I don't give much credence to so-called prophetic or psychic dreams (and I say that as someone who has had my share of them over these many years), but the ones involving my contact with loved ones who have passed on have had qualities that ordinary dreams do not, and my vision of the underworld is almost always the same from one such dream to the next:  a kind of external world turned inside-out, indoors, and the entire place is crowded with people I don't know except for the one person I'm most hoping to see, who can't come out all the way to meet me, and who can talk to me only briefly before having to go back.  It's almost like a hundred worlds that overlap in some grandiose double-exposure, where the dead can move from one world to another at certain "intersections".  (Okay.  I'm trying to avoid saying it, but it's like an inter-dimensional shopping mall.  No Orange Julius, though.)  I'm not describing this well at all, yet it's a vivid impression that repeats consistently whenever I think I have a dream about visiting the dead.

For that reason, I wondered what y'all believe and if you've had your own "vision of the underworld" where you've reconnected with dead loved ones.  If you have, would you be willing to share it here.

Thanks.

[TAPS Jen]

OK - not to get all weird, but Karl - what you wrote sounded familiar.

On the very rare occasion I will see my grandmother in my dreams. The one that stands out is on where I'm in a very crowded room (with yellow walls) People are sitting, standing, shopping, reading. She isn't "allowed" to come out all the way to meet me (as she explains it in the dream) I want to say she comes out of a white door. We talk for a few precious minutes. Mostly about me needing to make peace with a particular family situation. She congratulated me on my marriage and said she liked MIchael. The olfactory sense of it is overwhelming. I wake up still smelling her. She told me that my grandfather (also passed) is still having "a hard time" and won't be able to see me yet. It's quick because she "has to get back." She says she loves me and then leaves through the door. Then it's someone else's turn to see their loved one. It almost felt like everyone in that room wasn't really supposed to be there.

I never thought of it as a real underworld. I thought of that particuler dream as really seeing her - the emotions upon waking up were overwhelming. I figured my brain just created the place.

I like to think it was really her.

[PPI Karl]

Thanks for your response, Jen.  I does make me wonder, sometimes, if the architecture of the underworld is just a means for us to organize the powerfully disorganizing effect of grief to our psyche, and we use whatever architectural "archetypes" are most familiar to us.  This might explain why the literature of such journeys to the underworld always featured elements familiar to the travelers:  caves and rivers, and doorways into mountainsides and secret entrances underneath old trees, and such.  Dante's Inferno is a veritable smorgasbord of pre-Renaissance architecture.  It makes you wonder, don't it.