Dreams about Death of a Loved One

If you believe what psychologist Sigmund Freud said years ago, dreams are a collection of memories, ideas, experiences and incidents, present and stored in our unconscious mind, of which we are sometimes unaware of! According to him, our conscious is just a tip of the iceberg and beneath it lie layers of our subconscious. Our dreams thus, in a way, bring forth what lies in our subconscious mind. That's why, if we are somehow able to detect the meaning of dreams, it would help us to know ourselves better.

In simple words, dream interpretation is all about attaching some symbol to the images, incidents and things that we see in our dreams. According to dream analysts, what we see in our dreams is not actually what happens in real life. Instead, what we see in dreams signifies or represents something else!

Speaking of dreams, a commonly experienced dream is to see someone close dying. Any person who sees his spouse or parents or siblings die, is bound to get very uncomfortable at the very thought! However, as I said before, it does not mean that they are actually going to die. Death here symbolizes something else. Let us try to understand and analyze what do dreams about death mean and signify.

Various Interpretations

A dream about the death of a loved one, especially a spouse, could mean that there is something wrong with your relationship with them. Seeing them dead can be interpreted as your fear of losing them or they leaving you. Similarly, if you have seen dreams about death of a friend or someone else in the family, probably you need to re-assess your relationship with them. Such dreams could indicate that you need to take steps such as communicate more with them or spend more time with them, in order to re-establish the same bonding that you once had, but which is now dying or decaying!

Another interpretation of a death dream is that it represents the end of something important in your life. It could be the end of some strong belief that you held, the end of a career, the end of a marriage, etc. Or perhaps, you are trying to free yourself from the old values and rules of life that you have been living by for so many years. It could mean that you are trying to re-invent yourself!

Sometimes, this type of dream could mean that there are certain qualities in an individual that you find changing in yourself. For instance, If you saw a close friend dying and you know him as someone very honest, such a dream could mean that perhaps you have not been honest in your dealings in the past! The death dream could be interpreted as death of honesty in you.

If you see from the scientific point of view, nightmares or bad dreams could signify some sort of stress, anxiety or a mental disturbance that a person is experiencing. An underlying health problem, substance abuse, a feeling of embarrassment or guilt, could be behind the bad dreams that a person gets!

All the above interpretations hold true if the person dreamed of is still alive. However, if someone close has actually died and a person dreams the same, irrespective of the fact that he died recently or years ago, it could be a way employed by the subconscious mind to heal oneself of the loss and pain suffered. As you can see, there are various ways to interpret these disturbing dreams, the key lies in identifying what is applicable to you!