After Zane was killed, I started journaling my dreams. Somewhere I had read that dreams were the gateway to the other realm and that if you started recording them shortly after you woke, your intuition would increase. It became a nightly practice to shut off the external world, meditate and drift off to another possible adventure with my boy.

I had forgotten of the many dreams I had of Zane then. Each dream had a different scenario and Zane was different ages, but the ‘life like’ feeling of him being there was the thread of each one. I wrote about his laugh and his mannerisms and his role as my confidante. The dreams were of make-believe happenings; a conference we attended together, or our first home but he was a teenager, or Zane as a father of a 6-year-old girl. I would journal the dream details in the morning before they were gone.  Each incident was as if he visited me and each time I would wake, I would have a feeling of peace.  He was close. He was tangible. And I began to look forward to sleeping, knowing that we would be together. And then I quit dreaming.

When grief is new, we pray for visits from our loved ones while we sleep. We revel in the bitter-sweet joy they bring when they do happen and pout when days or weeks go by without a dream of them. Why do the dreams not happen? What became of my dreams that after the first year or two were less and less frequent? Why did I stop journaling?

I believe it is because our grief is no longer raw. Time pulls us away from the significance of being able to sit in the shock of our grief. The influences of others and demands of ‘moving forward’.  We quit practicing the techniques we learned that connect us to spirit. Our ability to keep things simple and open to the other realm gets put on a shelf because our daily grind demands our attention.  We become tired; battle worn.

We tend to complicate our lives with too many thoughts, or we get back to old habits rather than the new ones that dream journaling need to be practiced to be its best.  Like meditation. Like being still. Like listening to the silence or the melodic tunes of HZ music.  All of these we know bring us closer to spirit, but we become too busy or feel too hurt to keep it up.  And then we wonder why we are not visited as much. We forget what Rumi tells us, “Death has nothing to do with going away.  The sun sets, the moon sets.  But they are not gone.”

Dreaming about our loved ones is finding that spot in between the setting of the sun and moon.  Where our loved ones wait to visit us. It is we that must raise our consciousness to a higher level to open up the possibility of connecting. We must make this part of our daily exercise if we want to continue a new relationship with those we love.

My journals inspired me to record my dreams again. The recollections of these visions, time spent with my son on another level of awareness, reminded me that he is still in my life. He is waiting for me to meet him under the stars to laugh together until the moon sets and the sun awakens.