Grave Graveyard

This depicts our thoughts and feelings regarding death. It may relate to your family heritage of attitudes or traditions. Sometimes, but not often, such a dream is about contact with the dead. But more frequently things in our life we have ‘buried’. It can also refer to melancholy feelings about life or feeling ‘different’ to other people; or even a relationship, which we think is ‘dead and buried’. See: burial; cemetery; tomb.

For a number of people in their dreams the grave is also a place of transformation as shown in the following examples. It can be consciousness resurrected out of the grave of deadening materialism, out of the mirage of the profit motive or the fanfare of the identity supermarket.

“Men have collected stones since the beginning of time and have apparently assumed that certain ones were the containers of the life-force with all its mystery. The ancient Germans, for instance, believed that the spirits of the dead continued to live in their tombstones. The custom of placing stones on graves may spring partly from the symbolic idea that something eternal of the dead person remains, which can be most fittingly represented by a stone. For while the human being is as different as possible from a stone, yet man’s innermost centre is in a strange and special way akin to it (perhaps because the stone symbolises mere existence at the farthest remove from the emotions, feelings, fantasies, and discursive thinking of ego-consciousness). In this sense the stone symbolises what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience – the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable.

The urge that we find in practically all civilisations to erect stone monuments to famous men or on the site of important events probably also stems from this symbolic meaning of the stone. The stone that Jacob placed on the spot where he had his famous dream, or certain stones left by simple people on the tombs of local saints or heroes, show the original nature of the human urge to express an otherwise inexpressible experience by the stone-symbol. It is no wonder that many religious cults use a stone to signify God or to mark a place of worship. The holiest sanctuary of the Islamic world is the Ka’aba, the black stone in Mecca to which all pious Muslims hope to make their pilgrimage.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.

Example: Hello Tony, I want share this with you as well. Dream: death: Rebirth for me is my title of my dream. I was aware of myself and I was going downwards, descending. It was like I was dying and I could see myself descending down like into a grave. As I was doing this I realized that I would be in complete darkness. No light. As I was watching this I was aware I started ascending upwards as well. As I was doing this I realized that I had changed and my entire body even my face was changing. In all of this changing I saw my face change as well. I was the same Dona but with a different body. I was seeing myself and I was very young very beautiful with blonde hair. I was aware of being so happy looking. I was smiling and I had on a long blue grown that looked like Victorian style. I was very rich looking as well. I was aware I was very happy with my new self. Then I had this dream vision. I was aware of seeing the kundalini appear to me on her own as the beautiful cobra. I was aware of her pose and she was erect and upwards with her hood wide open. Her colors caught my eye. She was black on her back and her stomach was solid white. Which to me is like the colours of yin, and banshee was standing there looking at me and I was doing the same. She only wanted me too know she was there with me it seem. She didn’t say anything nor was her mouth open either. I think the colors mean too me that the male part and feminine are balanced. She did not try to hurt me or scare me or make me afraid of her. She was very calm with me as she stood in front of me facing me. I was very calm and not afraid either. Tony this is an awesome vision of her I saw and the beauty of her is awesome. I am so thrilled she is my inner guru and my guide with so much love for me. Thank you for letting me share this with you.  See Banshee and Kundalini

But there is another side to grave, the terrors we meet when we are frightened of our own demise.

Example: As I did this, the door to my right creaked open, and two black men entered. They looked as if they had risen out of a grave, almost as if the flesh was hanging of them. I was very frightened as they came towards me with their arms reaching to me. So I made the sign of the cross, and said one of the words of power used by the group. At this the two black men disappeared. I felt, not only great relief, but also as if my knowledge had given me some power. I suppose, once more, there was some smugness, as if I was strong enough to meet anything. So I lay back in bed ready to sleep. As I did so, once more the door creaked open, and in came the black men. This time none of my waving of hands in the sign of the cross, and all my magic words, stopped them. They reached me and their hands went around my throat to strangle me. I woke up screaming and terrified.”

Over a period of time the man was able to face these fears and discover what they were in reality. He says, “It had taken me that long to meet what were my own terrors. And what I gradually uncovered was that the terror was about my own sexual urges that I had forcefully buried. Those black men were my own natural urges that I had pushed into the grave of my unconscious; natural urges that I had turned inwards against myself. I even more slowly realised that there is nothing evil in our us, but forces in us that have been turned into a direction that is negative. All the holy words cannot protect us from meeting ourselves and what we have done to ourselves. The church has educated us to believe that there is so much evil in us and the film industry has deepened that.”

Example: “I really want to let everyone know something,” she said. “C. S. Lewis once said that life is a public performance where you learn about life as you go along. This is a model for me. We learn the way to be as we do it. We make mistakes. We keep missing life. We learn that we die as we live, but our expectations are in death. We bring forth the expectations we have about death in our dying. If we expect them to be shitty and full of suffering, that’s how they will show up. It’s the mood and tone and pattern that we re supposed to have sex in. The real sex is the sex between two people as they invent it right then. Mostly, I say, like sex death is not the way we expect it to be. Unfortunately, we act it out the way we have been taught (both in sex and in death). It’s too bad because it could be quite spectacular, quite amusing. The fact is we should leave ourselves open to see what’s possible with death. Otherwise, it’s such a cliché’. So here’s the thing and it’s rife, and there’s plenty of opportunity to do it wrong. I’ve learned so much, in actual fact, about my living and dying and about my to-be death. My death is right on schedule. It’s me who isn’t.” Quoted from Death Dreams by Kenneth Kramer

Example: Though he had left her well provided for economically, after his death she felt she had no emotional resources to live on and was too old to find any. Drink, and acting as custodian of mementoes from the past—her husband’s clothing, his toothbrush and other possessions—were her only interests, aside from speaking of him as often as possible, almost as if he were alive.

She brought with her to her session a pipe that had been her husband’s favorite and which she often looked at and held when she wanted to feel especially close to him.  Finally, she closed her eyes and reported that the pipe was “getting warm” and then that she had the feeling of holding not the pipe but instead her husband’s hand. She now experienced the first of many vivid memory sequences during which she “relived” with intense emotion a great many past events. Her husband seemed “real as life” and she wept with joy at his “return from the grave.”

She then began to talk to her husband, telling him how much she had missed him since his death, how difficult life had been for her, and how their friends had abandoned her since she had started to drink. To the guide’s inquiry, she explained that the sense of her husband’s presence was “completely real” and that he listened “very seriously” to her discourse and sympathized with her plight, but managed nonetheless to convey the idea that he “didn’t really approve” of the way she had been behaving. She fell silent, and finally reported that the pipe was only a pipe again, that it was growing cold, and the sense of her husband’s presence was becoming very faint. Then, however, it returned once again—a presence so powerfully felt that she thought she could “reach out and touch him.” She felt her husband smiled at her lovingly, conveying “whole worlds of encouragement and strength,” then slowly turned his back and walked away. Then the sense of presence was extinguished and somehow she knew that he would “come no more.” The pipe now was “cold and lifeless” in her hands and had “nothing more to do” with her husband. “At long last,” she said, he was “gone. Dead. Really dead. He has made me understand that and I have got to accept it. That is what he would want me to do. Quoted from LSD The Problem Solving Drug by Stafford and Golightly.

In the above the woman is led to realise the awful condition of being so dependent on her husband. In talking with him he led her to see her mistake and stop wanting him with her in the body.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Am I frightened of dying?

What does the grave in my dreams make me feel?

Can I imagine being in the grave to see what feelings it provokes?

See Summing Up – Life’s Little Secrets – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Edgar Cayce – Near Death Experiences