Survival Dreams

Weird… right when I was about to write the word “dead” the lights turned off… then came back on. Anyway… have you ever had a dream where you a dead person communicated with you? In today’s post, I would like to talk about these types of dreams called Survival Dreams. Survival, in this context, does not mean the survival of a dreamer, which is us, but rather, the survival of a dead person.

There have been many accounts of people having dreams where they experienced the ability to communicate with individuals beyond earth. These people are referred as “The Dead,” and when appearing in these people’s dreams, these spirits usually convey a message to the dreamer that something has just happened, will happen, or that the dreamer should take immediate action to change a circumstance of the future.

Some of these messages will come from late family and relatives, and others will come from close friends. Not all survival dreams will make sense in the dream or upon awakening, but will eventually become clearer to the dreamer. Here are five survival dreams that are from The Psychic Side of Dreams, by Hanz Holzer, involving messages from dead people to the dreamer.

Case Examples of Survival Dreams

1. “… May 7, 1969. According to the newspaper, a mother in Karachi, Pakistan, dreamt of May 7 that an old man in white told her to dig up the grave of her two-year-old daughter, fifty hours after the funeral. When she told the story to her neighbors, she was laughed at. But a few believed her and went to the cemetery to open the grave. The child was still alive and sucking her thumb when the coffin was opened. The mother’s psychic dream had saved its life. Who the spirit communicate was, has not been reported. Evidently someone “on the Other side” felt that the time for the child had not yet arrived, and decided to intervene” (Holzer 131).

2. “Rose T. of Vienna, Austria, reports an interesting dream under the postmark of October 24, 1974. She was living with her aged mother, and a brother who had turned into an alcoholic and was considered a threat to the rest of the family. Because of excitement, Mrs. T.’s mother passed away on October 27, 1973. Shortly before she died, she confided to her daughter Rose, ‘Should I not return from the hospital then I will come for my son, because he is no good.’ Due to an accident, the alcoholic son also died, On January 27, 1974. The night before the funeral, Rose had a dream in which she walked from her room into a smaller room where she saw her mother seated on the bed, as if she were still alive. The mother said, ‘Rose, I am going to come with you today.’ To which the daughter, in the dream, replied, “Mother, that is impossible, you are no longer alive.” But the mother insisted that she would come along with her daughter. The following day, at the funeral for her brother, Rose was completely alone, since there were no other relatives, or close friends. Under the circumstances her mother’s company, although unseen, was a real relief” (Holzer 137-138).

3. “Mrs. Regina Rudinger of New York City reports a most unusual dream, which occurred to her sister, Mrs. M. S. of Boston. In the dream a brother, who had passed away previously, made contact with Mrs. S., demanding that his body be disinterred from the cemetery and moved to a different part because of deep water accumulating in his grave. The family hesitated to do anything about this, and discussed it with religious authorities. Finally, the received authorization from the board of health and the grave was opened. It turned out that the discarnate brother’s complaint was based on fact: the grave was filled with water, and the body was therefore moved to a drier site. The original grave is still empty” (Holzer 138).

4. “…Mrs. Helen J., who lives in upstate New York and one of whose sons passed away tragically. In June 1966, she had a dream in which she became aware of being in a higher spiritual world, out of the earth of mortal man, as she put it. She saw herself standing in a very beautiful room, aware of the beautiful colors and a sense of happiness beyond human feeling and description. ‘Suddenly I knew that God was granting me the blessing of being able to speak to my son this night,’ Mrs. J. relates. ‘He appeared before me and embraced me. We spoke through thought transference. I said, ‘Tell me, David, who is it like over there?’ My son replied, ‘Mother, it is beautiful over here and no one grows old. Earth is the pathway to hell.’ I then asked him if I could go with him and he put his arm out as if to stop me and said, ‘No, not yet, but you will be here before the end of the world” (Holzer 140).

Sometimes, survival dreams will also express their final phrase of communication, not just from a dead person, but by a living person who is just about to cross over to the other side of the world. Consider this example, of Mrs. Virginia Fleming:

5. “…Six years later, on November 22, 1968, she had another experience of a similar kind. Again she had gone to bed rather early, and was awakened by the same voice calling to her, just her name, ‘Jini.’ Again, she looked at her watch, and found it was 11:33 P.M. At the same time she remembered having heard in a dream the sound of a body falling hard on pavement. It was so real, in fact, that she got up and walked down to the street to see whether it had actually happened in front of her house. Immediately she assumed that something had happened to her husband, but she didn’t know until the following morning what the voice had warned her about. At 7:00 A.M. she heard on the news that her first cousin, Lawrence had been killed by a car while crossing the street. The accident happened at precisely 11:33 P.M., the moment when the voice had entered her dream” (Holzer 136).

How could it be that an old deceased person was able to tell a mother to go to the funeral to dig open her son’s grave?

Do The Dead have the power to give life back to people such as the child who was still alive in the coffin?

Could it have been possible that a deceased mother could have taken his son’s life away for being an alcoholic?

When Rose was alone at her brother’s funeral, was her deceased mother really with her?

How could a body know that water was filling up its grave and send a message t to a dreamer to relocate the grave?

Is it truly possible that we can communicate with The Dead in our dreams, such as the mother did with her son?

Finally, can we predict that a person is about to pass away based on the emotional intensity of hearing their cry for help?

These are some questions that I kept asking myself over and over again after reading these types of dreams from the book. It is said that it is easier for the dead to communicate to people in the physical when they are asleep, rather than when they are awake. I would not doubt this, as our knowledge of the unconscious mind, or the state that we are sleeping in is still limited.

Even when we cannot see or prove that they exist, it is evident that people have had dreams in which they were given a message by somebody that was dead, and after waking up that message came to be true in reality.

Perhaps it is because we have a special kind of sensory or perception organs that we have during our sleep, exclusive to when we are in the awakening state. Nevertheless, the ability to have this “extra” sense to be able to communicate with people beyond our reach is a fascinating subject. And if there is possible communication that only exists in the dreamy state, we should be more conscious of it, as perhaps The Dead are trying to reach out and help us, as it did for the mother who saved her child that was still alive when the coffin was opened.