When Grandmothers Visit: Comfort Beyond Reason
My grandmother appears in my dreams exactly as she was before the illness took her words, before the hospital bed replaced her kitchen table, before death transformed her from presence to memory. In dreams, she is fully herself again—making tea, telling stories, offering advice with the authority of someone who has seen enough of life to know what matters and what doesn’t.
These visitation dreams carry a strange comfort that no conscious consolation can match. While awake, I can only remember her or imagine conversations we might have had. But in dreams, she simply is—not a memory or a fantasy but a vivid, immediate presence who somehow still exists in the landscape of sleep.
The comfort comes not from wish fulfillment but from a deeper sense that death might not be the absolute ending it appears to be. In dreams, the boundary between here and gone becomes permeable, suggesting that love creates its own form of eternity, that consciousness might exist in dimensions unavailable to waking perception.
When I dream of my grandmother, she often knows things I don’t know, offers perspectives I haven’t considered, provides wisdom that feels genuine rather than projected. It’s as if some part of her continues to exist independently of my conscious mind, available to my unconscious in ways my rational mind cannot explain or accept.
The strangest thing is how natural these encounters feel within the dream. There’s no surprise at her presence, no grief at her supposed death, no confusion about how she can be both gone and here. In the logic of dreams, love transcends physical absence, connection survives disconnection, and being dead doesn’t prevent being alive in the ways that matter most.
Maybe the comfort of dreaming about people who are gone isn’t about denying death but about discovering that death doesn’t eliminate everything. That whatever creates love and connection and recognition might exist independently of bodies and time, accessible to consciousness in its most open, least defended state.
Tonight I’m grateful for the visitation dreams that offer comfort beyond comprehension, presence beyond possibility, proof that love finds ways to continue conversations that death was supposed to end.
