Communication from beyond?

Humans have created many different beliefs about what happens after death ever since they evolved into human beings—or maybe even earlier, for all we know. The question, “is there anything after death?” has been at the heart of all of the thousands of religions humans have created over thousands of millennia, and it’s probably one of the main reasons religions still exist. There’s no way to know for sure if there’s anything after humans die, and, if something does, what that might be. However, that doesn’t stop people believing they can communicate with the dead or vice versa. Whether one has a religion or not, the possibility that communication might be possible is enticing, if nothing else.

Last month, Pew Research Center released the results of a survey, reporting that “Many Americans report interacting with dead relatives in dreams or other ways” (see their chart up top). Pew noted:

While the survey asked whether people have had interactions with dead relatives, it did not ask for explanations. We don’t know whether people view these experiences as mysterious or supernatural, or whether they see them as having natural or scientific causes, or some of both.

Those are important caveats, because, for example, there are people who have no religion, but who are nevertheless sure they’ve had such interactions, and there are religious pe0ple who say they have not. The details of that are interesting:

Roughly two-thirds of Catholics (66%) and members of the historically Black Protestant tradition (67%) have ever experienced a visit from a deceased family member in some form. Evangelical Protestants are far less likely to say the same (42%).

Roughly half (48%) of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – atheists, agnostics, and those who report their religion is “nothing in particular” – say they have ever been visited by a dead relative in a dream or other form. However, those who describe their religion as nothing in particular are much more likely to say they have ever been visited by a deceased loved one (58%) than are agnostics (34%) and atheists (26%).

We would expect atheists and agnostics to have a lower likelihood of saying they’ve ever had interactions with dead loved ones, but considering how much emphasis Christianity places on death and their version of an afterlife, it frankly surprised me that “evangelical protestants” weren’t all that much more likely to say they’d had such interactions than agnostics were.

Be that as it may, it’s also clear that for all segments of society, dreams were most likely to be the way the interaction happened. I think that’s thoroughly unsurprising: Everyone dreams (apparently), and many people would have dreams with dead loved ones in them—I have, too. The question is really whether they believe the dream was some sort of visitation by the loved one or not, because that, it seems to me, is what would—or, maybe I should say could—make it an interaction rather than merely a dream. My own dreams haven’t answered that question for me.

The first dream I wrote about here was ”The dream about my ‘only you’”, three years ago this month. While that dream felt relevant to what I was feeling at the time, it didn’t seem even remotely like some sort of visitation or whatever because, while it was related to Nigel, it wasn’t actually about him—and possibly didn’t even have him in it.

The next dream I remembered (and remembered to write down at the time, which isn’t necessarily the same thing) came in January 2022. That dream was, as I said at the time, “A different and unusual, usual sort of dream”. That particular dream had elements that were kinda, sorta visitation-like, but was it one? I didn’t think so.

In June of this year, I had another dream with Nigel in it, one that, like my dream in September 2020, the dream was about what I was feeling at that time, though this one was also a bit like the January 2022 dream in that it had kinda, sorta visitation-like elements to it.

In the final post of my Ask Arthur 2020 series, I answered a question about dreams that Roger Green asked. In that post, I talked about dreams (or snippets), two of which involved Nigel. I didn’t talk about them anywhere else, and neither of them seemed particularly kinda, sorta visitation-like.

And then, there’s that other time…

In July 2022, I published a post, “An unusual thing happened”. in which I talked about the closest I’ve ever come to a possible visitation:

It was about an hour or so before my target time to get up, I was lightly asleep, deep enough to not be aware of my surroundings or to have conscious awareness of dreams, and also not awake enough to have any sort of self-directed dream. In fact, at the time, it didn’t seem like I was dreaming at all.

So, I was in that thick fog that lies on either side of the border between sleep and wakefulness, and I heard Nigel’s voice saying clearly and distinctly, “Are you there?” There were no visuals of any kind, just the sound, and it startled me awake. I felt kind of frightened, to be honest, for no rational reason, except, maybe, that it sounded so real, and that’s physically impossible.

Part of what made that so confronting is that, as I also said in that post, “When I dream, the people in them don’t sound much like they do/did in real life—they sound kind of muffled, mumbling, often kind of vague…” That’s what made the “unusual thing” so very different from any of my dreams with Nigel in them.

When I wrote about the dream, it reminded me that I’d had another experience I couldn’t explain, one that felt very much like a visitation from my mother because “it definitely felt real, both physically and in that sort of ethereal way we feel when we’re physically close to someone with whom we have a strong connection,” something I felt a weaker version that I felt was Nigel’s presence.

I’ve said main times, and in many ways, that my scepticism around the idea of some sort of existence after death, and also the possibility of communication with/from the dead. Is NOT the same as rejection of the possibility that one or both are real. I simply need evidence, something I also talked about in the “An unusual thing happened” post.

Having said all of that, and with all of my qualifications and explanations, if I’d been surveyed by Pew Research, the only honest I answer could have given was that, yes, I was visited in a dream. Whether that actually happened or not is the question I cannot answer. However, for me, the possibility it could’ve been communication from Nigel was comforting, and even if that comfort was all there was to it, it was enough for me. Maybe that’s true for the people surveyed, too?

Still, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So… maybe?