I very rarely remember my dreams, perhaps fifteen in an entire year if that, so when I woke up this morning with a dream of someone who died in 2016 still completely intact in my head, it really stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t one of those bizarre, fragmented dreams where people appear for no reason, everything changes every few seconds and you wake up wondering what the hell your brain was doing. This one was different because it felt incredibly real: I was with other people and suddenly he was there too, and I was hugging him and he was holding me so tightly. I remember feeling so incredibly happy to see him, and even now I can still feel that happiness sitting underneath everything else.
We talked as though there was nothing remotely strange about him being there and nothing that needed explaining, and at some point he told me he was going to a wine tasting later that day, which is such an ordinary little detail that somehow it makes the whole thing feel even more real. He wasn’t appearing in some dramatic dream about death or giving me some great message from beyond the grave; he was simply there, alive, making plans for later in the day, and I was there with him. There were a couple of other women in the room who were trying to get to know him, but he seemed to have absolutely no interest in them because he only wanted to be with me. I know that could easily be dismissed as my brain constructing some flattering little fantasy, but that isn’t actually how it felt. What mattered wasn’t that other women wanted him, it was that he chose to spend time with me, and there was something incredibly powerful about that feeling of being recognised and wanted by someone who had once loved me.
And then I woke up, and remembered that he died of MND in 2016. That is the part that makes the whole thing so strange, because this isn’t someone I have been consciously thinking about every day for years, and I don’t routinely dream about him. Yet suddenly, after all this time, there he was again, alive and warm and holding me as though no time had passed at all. Perhaps that is actually what makes the dream worth thinking about, because there is quite a lot of psychology around dreams of people who have died, and it is much more interesting than the old-fashioned idea that dreaming about someone means you haven’t “got over” them.
A 2026 systematic review of 110 publications looking at dreams of deceased people found recurring themes of comfort, connection, guidance and continued relationship, with the overall impact tending to be positive. There is also a body of research around something called continuing bonds, which is essentially the idea that when someone dies, the relationship doesn’t necessarily disappear because part of that person remains represented inside us through memory, emotion, identity, familiar experiences and the internal sense of who they were to us. Research into continuing bonds suggests that this can form part of how people make sense of bereavement and adapt to the reality of someone’s death, rather than being evidence that they are somehow unable to move on.
There has even been research specifically looking at dreams of deceased romantic partners, rather than simply deceased relatives or friends, and researchers have identified several possible functions for these dreams, including processing the loss, maintaining a continuing bond and regulating emotion. The research suggests that these dreams can actually facilitate adjustment to bereavement rather than indicating that something has gone wrong psychologically. When I think about who he actually was, I can understand why he might exist somewhere very deep in my emotional memory, even though I don’t spend my waking life thinking about him.
He wasn’t simply an ex-boyfriend whose face happens to be filed away somewhere in my memory. He was one of my university lecturers, and that intellectual side of him was woven into our relationship in a way that made everything feel bigger than ordinary life. He used to read Baudelaire poems and introduced me to Byron, and maybe there is something about being with someone who can open up a whole world through words that stays with you in a completely different way from remembering someone’s clothes or their favourite restaurant or the ordinary things you happened to do together.
And then there was Paris, with those beautiful, romantic nights that seem almost impossible to explain afterwards because they don’t really feel as though they belonged to reality. He always cooked for me, we drank Krug, so there was this whole combination of food and wine, conversation for hours, books as well as physical closeness that created a version of life that was intensely alive. It wasn’t just a relationship; it was surreal – a particular world that existed only when I was with him – he even lived in a house with huge old walls around the garden – like some fairy tale castle, so perhaps these things can become embedded much deeper than I perhaps realised until today.
Then there was the other side of him, because he wasn’t only this romantic, intellectual man who read Baudelaire and Byron and cooked for me. He was also a Royal Marines Reservist, which seems almost ridiculously different from the image of him sitting with me reading poetry, and perhaps that contrast was part of what made him so compelling. There were all these different versions of him occupying the same person: the academic, the romantic, the military man, the cook, the man who could sit with me over tea and poetry, and somehow all of those things became part of the emotional landscape of my life. So perhaps my brain didn’t simply dream about a dead man; perhaps it found an old emotional world I needed after a long day helping people.
I remember listening to an Andrew Huberman podcast which led me down a rabbit hole: there is a theory in dream research called the continuity hypothesis, which basically suggests that dreams don’t exist completely separately from waking life but tend to reflect things that are emotionally important to us, including relationships and significant experiences. Research into dreams involving partners/former partners has found that romantic relationships do indeed show up in dreams and that the emotional tone can be surprisingly positive, even when the relationship itself is long over. I think that distinction matters, because I don’t necessarily think this dream means that I am secretly still mourning him in some unresolved way. I think it may mean that there are parts of an experience that don’t get erased simply because the person who shared them with us dies. The brain isn’t a filing cabinet where you put someone under “past relationship” and MS eventually shreds the folder after the statutory 90 days or whatever their policy is… Some people become part of the architecture of our life: their voice becomes associated with certain poems, their hands with cooking, their face with a particular city, their presence with a particular feeling of being desired, their taste with a bottle of champagne, their conversation with a particular version of ourselves that existed when we were with them. All of those things can sit quietly for years until something, somewhere, activates the network again.
This time it wasn’t Baudelaire or Byron or Paris or Krug that appeared first; it was the hug, and that is the bit I am still smiling about; he held me so tightly, and I was so happy to see him. Maybe that is what my brain was giving me, not an explanation and not necessarily a message, but a few moments in which I could experience the emotional reality of someone who had been such a significant part of my life. According to the research, dreams of deceased loved ones can have an emotional regulatory function, and accessing an internal representation of someone who is gone can still affect how we feel. I’m glad my sleeping brain didn’t give me the MND, something I didn’t even know about until after he had died (life can be so cruel at times, and for someone with his need for the great outdoors and being fit, this debilitating disease would have been horrendous). Instead, it gave me the man before all of that: the university lecturer who was an intoxicating meld of both the intellectual world of poetry and the very physical world of being a bootneck.
I’m glad this dream was about recognition, reconnection and that strange persistence of emotional memory, because for a little while my brain didn’t know that he was gone; I got to see him and be held again. Rather than waking up devastated by the reminder that he had died, I woke up with this extraordinary feeling of happiness that, somehow, I had been given the chance to talk to him again, even if only in a dream. I feel as though I have been handed something back that I didn’t realise I still had, not him, obviously, but the mental interaction. To me, continuing bonds isn’t about refusing to accept that someone has died or living in the past, and it certainly doesn’t mean that every dream has to be interpreted as some supernatural visitation; perhaps it is simply that someone who mattered enough to shape part of my life remains woven into the internal world I still carry.
When I think of him now, I think of Paris at night, beautiful walks along the Seine, long conversations, poetry, the smell of food he was cooking, glasses of Krug and that slightly intoxicating buzz that life with him allowed me to experience through all my senses. What came back to me in that dream wasn’t simply a person I loved, but an entire little world that existed around him, and for a few precious moments, after a long day helping others through their bereavement anniversaries, I was back inside it.
References
- Mamat, Z., Owaisi, R. B., Alrai, S., et al. (2026). “Dreams of the deceased: A scoping and mixed-methods systematic review.” Sleep Medicine, 140, 108787.
- Hewson, H., Galbraith, N., Jones, C., & Heath, G. (2024). “The impact of continuing bonds following bereavement: A systematic review.” Death Studies, 48(10), 1001–1014.
- Black, J., Belicki, K., Piro, R., & Hughes, H. (2021). “Comforting Versus Distressing Dreams of the Deceased: Relations to Grief, Trauma, Attachment, Continuing Bonds, and Post-Dream Reactions.” OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, 84(2), 525–550.
- Schredl, M. et al. (2021). “Partners and Ex-Partners in Dreams: A Diary Study.” Clocks & Sleep, examining the continuity hypothesis of dreaming and the emotional content of partner and ex-partner dreams.
