Dream of deceased loved one

Hi everyone! I haven't posted here in a long time, so I figured I'd share a dream I had with all of you. I was at a train station, when a train to NYC pulled up. I got on, but there was no one there. The lights in the train were so bright, I could barely look at them. It was almost white. Then, sitting across from me, was my grandfather. I was VERY close with him. My grandparents raised me, so when he passed, I was devastated. We both got up and hugged each other for what felt like an eternity. I could even smell the cream he use to use on his hands and the paint he would use to make signs in his earlier years. We both sat down across from each other. The only thing I was able to say was "is it real?". He nodded his head and pulled on his chin, then said "yeah... it is". My grandmother (who is alive) in a younger form appeared next to him. She was translucent, but I could see her laughing and smiling. I looked at them, and my grandfather said "soon.. A black holiday". Then the train stopped. He told me I had to go. As I stepped off the train, I seen a big closure sign over the area where I needed to be to get home. I got nervous, but out of no where, a friend of mine appeared. He grabbed my arm and pulled me saying " WE HAVE TO GO..NOW". He ran me into a train going a different way, and I woke up.

I'm not sharing this for any other reason but to get it off my chest. I don't know what it meant, but I felt different when I woke up. I am not a spiritual person. As a matter of fact, my grandfather and I use to briefly talk about heaven and hell. When I say briefly, I mean I would ask him if he believed in it, and he would shrug his shoulders and say " I guess we'll find out". I don't know if this was my mind giving me a much needed conversation with my grandfather, or it was my grandfather from some other place letting me know he was okay.. Whatever it was, It was nice to talk to him. No one knows for sure what is in store after your last breath.. but, I guess we will all find out one day

Thanks for reading!!

I'm jealous. I wish that I could enjoy a dream like that of one of my passed loved ones. The possibility that you did have a dream visit is pretty good, but there are a few things to think about that can help you determine if it is more likely that it was a visit and not simply a dream.

If the dream was unique in its clarity and sense of immediacy, as compared to all other dreams you have had, then it may have been a visit. This is probably then most important indicator, and the answer should be obvious to you if it was a visit. The difference between a normal dream, a vivid dream and a visit is pretty profound, and if it was a visit, then you'll know that this was a very different experience.

If the dream "came out of nowhere" - meaning that there wasn't any circumstance precursor in your waking life that set your loved one into your immediate awareness prior to the dream event, then it could've been a visit. Dreams are the way that your short term and immediate memory items are sorted out for inclusion (or not) within your long term memory, and even if they are symbolic, the more significant characterizations will generally pertain to recent issues that you've dealt with. This isn't a very potent indicator, but it is something to consider in congress with all other indicators.

If the dream wasn't disjointed or sequentially fragmented, then it could've been a visit. Again, this is only a piece of the puzzle, but it is an important piece. A visit dream will have a sense of completeness and resolution to it. It won't be like most dreams that morph and disengage without a rhyme or reason as your hyper-logical brain does its best to construct a rational narrative with the incompatible compilation of bits and pieces it's moving from short term to long term memory status. Deceased loved ones can be featured in normal dreams, but it's generally pretty clear that it's just a dream if the loved one transforms into something unexpected or unrelated in the middle of the specific scenario they're being featured within. Which brings me to the last clue....

If, when you wake up, you just know that something was very different about that experience, then it's a good bet that you were visited by your loved one, and for no other reason than they felt like stopping by and saying hi. The truth is very likely that many of us are visited by our passed loved ones without our ever remembering the "dreams" they used to connect with us. This is because we only remember those dreams that we wake up within - even if it seems like the dream was over before we woke up. If another dream slips in before we awaken, that will be the dream we remember, and that's just the way it is. A visit is not orchestrated by your own brain. It's experienced by it. That experience just feels different to the person whose brain just experienced it, even if they can't readily explain why it feels different.

Our culture doesn't encourage a belief in this sort of thing, even if it does encourage the belief in an afterlife. In this culture, a person's afterlife happens far away from "here", and deeply ensconced within the bowels of either Heaven or Hell. The notion of loved ones being free to stop by is generally viewed as unacceptable, since the spiritual among us have declared such activity to be only possible for those whose "vibrational frequency" is extremely low (and therefore negative), while the secular/scientific among us have declared that physical existence is comprised only of particles and/or measurable energies. Neither of these established wisdom tenets allows for good people to visit other good people after they've passed away from this material realm.

Think about all of this, and come upon your own interpretation of what happened. If you can say that your dream fit every one of the criteria I listed above, then I'd say that your grandfather stopped by.

Thank you so much for your reply! I really enjoyed reading it. The dream wasn't immediately after his passing. In fact, it might have been more than a year after. Like I said though, I was very close to him. I don't think one day has gone by that I haven't thought of him. Whatever it was caused by, spiritual or otherwise, I really loved feeling like I seen him again.. And sometimes, certain things should just be appreciated and enjoyed. I think this was one of those occurrences. Thank you again for your response!!

As someone who's had many of those ultra-vivid and sometimes prophetic dreams, I'd have to say yours sounds like the real deal.

Even if it wasn't "real" in the objective sense, it was real to you. It gave you comfort and uplifted your mood. And that's all that really matters.

I've had two memorable dreams with my deceased grandfather - the first dream, I didn't even know it was my grandfather until a year after the dream!

On the night of the first dream, I was dreaming something very run-of-the-mill -- your typical average dream. Right in the middle of this dream, everything changed and I found myself in a completely new dream. It wasn't a morph of the existing dream, it was a drastic change. I found myself outside in a rural country setting, standing on a country road. I saw this young man walking towards me on this road. He was briskly walking, with a walking stick. I remember he had dark hair that was slicked back. As he walked towards me, he looked at me, smiled, and said "Hi there!" I didn't know why, but I panicked at that point and woke myself up, my heart pounding. After I was awake a few minutes, I wondered what this dream was all about, and why did I panic? He didn't look menacing or threatening in any way. Even though it was only a few seconds long, it was a dream that stuck with me for a long time. There was just something really "different" about this dream.

Fast forward a year later - I was at my parent's home. I was sitting in my father's study with my mom and we were talking. She then pointed to a photograph that was framed and on my father's desk. She said, "Look at this picture your grandmother just found of your grandfather (it was my Dad's father) when he was around 17 years old. It is the only photo your grandmother ever had that showed him with a full head of hair!" My grandfather started going bald in his twenties, and by the time he married my grandmother and had his kids, he was already pretty bald. This photo of him had been hidden away in a box since before my grandparents got married. None of his kids or grandkids had ever seen him with hair. None of us had ever seen a picture before of him with hair. Well, I took one look at the photo and it hit me like a ton of bricks. That was the young man I had seen in that dream a year ago!! He had the dark, slicked back hair, and the face was the same. Now that I looked at the photo, I could see the resemblance to my grandfather as I knew him. I always wondered why I panicked during the dream. Could it be because I knew who it was, but because it didn't look like the grandfather I knew and loved, it freaked me out? Who knows.

What's really kind of cool about that dream is that my grandfather died back in the early 1980's of emphysema. Before he got really sick, he had a lot of trouble breathing, and could hardly walk from the house to the car. Right before he died, he was bedridden with on oxygen tank. I'm hoping the purpose of the dream was to let me know that where ever he is now, he has no trouble taking a long brisk walk!

The second dream happened during a very stressful period in my life. In this dream, he was sitting on the end of my bed, and we were conversing telepathically. In this dream, he looked like the elderly grandfather I was familiar with. I was asking him questions, and he was answering me - although I couldn't remember what any of these questions/answers were after I woke up. The only part of the dream I remember was when he told me that whenever I go through troublesome times, he is nearby, trying to help me however he can. Maybe this was just a regular old dream, but it gave me great comfort, which I really needed at the time.