Neeners - Of course he is still with you in at least two ways. The first and most obvious way is within you as all the precious memories you carry about him. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with someone and they are what makes you the person you are. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event.
Also memory is not a fixed thing and it alters as we take in fresh views or experiences - we 'digest' our experiences also just as we do with food. We break it down and then we make it into our living being, and I think that is what you are doing in your dreams - drawing out the essence of him, his spirit.
I know most of us are taught that when our brain dies we are dead, but that doesn't fit with the latest scientific thought. This is explained in this link -
http://dreamhawk.com/news/there-is-a-huge-change-happening/ Many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum theory, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. Yet this view we take to be the REAL universe. The implications of the theories are enormous. Something can be in two places at once. Apparently distant objects, or people, are intricately linked in an immediate way. There is no separate existence as we previously thought. Our view of the world is not one supported by the facts of physics. Time and space are transcended. David Bohm, an eminent physicist, goes as far as to say that all things in our observable universe are inextricable linked. Nothing has separate existence. In a sense nothing ever dies.
From this viewpoint your husband has never left you but is intimately a part of your life. In dreams we are capable of leaping beyond the barriers imposed on our awareness by our limited senses and go beyond time and space in meeting. So to understand how dreams come about and realise what your dreams are telling you, it can help if you realise that just as your eyes do not directly allow you to see, but nerve impulses are sent to the brain where they are translated into living pictures. Also our eyes actually present an image that it upside down, but out great translator the brain turns it the right way up.
Nothing we sense in the world is directly known, but it is all impressions that are translated into a sense of smell, sight, hearing, etc. So the eye receives reflected light from an object that is translated into nervous impulses, which is then received by the brain which translates what are formless nerve impulses into what we feel we see.
So in dreams we tend to put pictures or images collected from everyday experiences to put an interpretation on our formless dreams. We do this because we tend to have an experience of the world based on our body senses, and our dreams and communications from the dead come from a very different environment, so we put it in images and ideas we understand. So when we dream about a dead person communicating with us it can be distorted by our view of what death is – or our associations with the dead person.
Tony