Bereaved Bereavement

Powerful depressive feelings can arise from the loss of anything to which we are deeply connected, particularly a person we love and perhaps depend upon. In dreams feelings of bereavement may be obviously about such a known loss, but occasionally the feelings arise from childhood, at which time they may have been difficult to allow or admit. Whatever the origin, it is helpful to talk the feelings over with someone who has listening skills. Even if it is not obvious from the dream where the feelings arise from, and even if the dream portrays them as being felt by someone else, it can still be of great help to talk about the dream. Essentially this is about loss.

A loss is usually a feeling similar to the loss of a tooth. One cannot help feeling the gap in ones life. Something that was a part of you now feels as if it has gone and left an absence.

The deeply painful feeling of bereavement directly influences the health of the body. Steven Schleifer and co-workers undertook a clinical study of conditions influencing the immune system. Healthy men whose wives had breast cancer were the studied. Fifteen of the wives died. The husbands of these women were discovered to have a measurable drop in the amount of disease-killing activity in their immune system. This clearly showed that a stressful experience such as bereavement had a negative influence on the immune system.

Other research showed that when people can share their grief with others who have suffered similar losses, their health and feeling of well-being greatly improves, and their return to moving beyond the grief process. But we often forget that we love differently in different periods of our life. Then we overlook how we may be trapped in a particular age of love, causing us enormous pain. See Ages of Love; .Near Death Experiences and Dreaming of Death.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What do I feel I have lost?

Is the feeling of loss from long ago or something in my present life?

What does the drama or theme of the dream say about loss? See: themes.

Growing Up to Love and Dream as Computer Game.