“Dreams which are not interpreted are like letters that have not been opened.”
—Erich Fromm
For five months after my brother died, I barely slept. I would lie awake in the dark, listening to my husband and children breathe in their rooms, and feel like the only person on earth who had been left out of some great, peaceful conspiracy.
What I remember most from those months is not the fatigue, though there was plenty of that. It was the longing. I missed my brother with a physical ache. I wanted, more than anything, to see him again — even for a moment, even in a dream. I wanted what surviving siblings often call one last visit.
I tried everything. Herbal teas with sleepy-sounding names. Warm baths. Warm milk. Warm milk baths. I read books on insomnia, books on dream interpretation, books on meditation. I slept with headphones on, lulled by New Age music supposedly designed to coax dreams up from the depths of the unconscious. And every night, I prayed: Just one dream, God. I’ll take anything.
Nothing came.
The terrible jealousy
What made it worse — and I am not proud of this — was that other people kept having dreams of him. My sister called me one morning, joyful, to tell me about a beautiful, radiant dream she’d had. He had looked healthy. He had looked happy. He had caught her eye across a room and held it.
I tried to be glad for her. I really did. But underneath the polite congratulations, a thirteen-year-old version of me was howling with envy. How could she dream about him before I did? I was older. I was his sister. I hung up the phone and sat staring at the floor for a very long time, trying to figure out what kind of person I had become.
In the weeks that followed I told myself all kinds of stories. That my brother loved my sister more. That I was somehow blocking him. That I was a worse person than I had ever suspected. None of this was true. But that is what grief will do to you at three in the morning, when you have not slept and the house is quiet.
A friend finally took me aside on a walk and told me, gently but firmly, that I needed to let the dream thing go. I was getting obsessive, she said. I bristled, of course — I was not obsessive, I was simply hopeful — but somewhere underneath the bristling I knew she was right. So I gave up. I stopped trying. I told myself, Maybe it’s just not in the cards.
That, of course, is when the dream came.
Swedish Fish
In the dream, my brother and I were leaning against the hood of his old black Mercedes, the one he loved and washed and cared for like a third child. The sun was warm. We were sharing a small white paper bag of Swedish Fish, the kind they sell in old-fashioned candy stores, the kind we had loved as children. I could not tell you, now, what we were laughing about. Only that we were laughing — both of us doubled over, the sun on our faces, the candy between us, his eyes squinting in the light the way they always had.
When I woke, I was still smiling. For a brief, blessed moment I forgot he was dead. Even after I remembered, his presence stayed with me through most of that morning — not in any spooky or supernatural sense, but in the way you can feel another person in a room without looking up. It is hard to describe to anyone who has not had a grief dream. The detail is luminous. The skin remembers. You wake up not having seen your brother but having been with him, and the difference between those two things is everything.
I have had other dreams of him since. Some funnier, some quieter, one or two that left me wrung out. But that first one I will carry to the end of my life. Whether it came from him, or from God, or from some deep, generous place inside my own grieving mind — I have stopped needing to know. The dream came when I let go of demanding it. Whatever its origin, it gave me the courage to face another day without him, and that was enough.
When the dreams are not gentle
I should say, because honesty matters here, that not all grief dreams are kind. Surviving siblings whose brothers or sisters died violently — in accidents, by suicide, in acts of war — sometimes endure terrible nightmares, the mind replaying possibilities it was never meant to witness. I have heard sibling dreams of the World Trade Center I will never forget.
If you are having dreams like that, please do not face them alone. Talk to a grief counselor, a therapist, a chaplain, anyone trained to sit with you in those images and help you carry them. Nightmares are also part of the grief landscape, and they deserve the same compassion — and often more support — than the gentler dreams.
What helps
If you are longing for a dream that has not yet come, I want to tell you what I wish someone had told me: be patient. A dream may come, and it may not come for a long time, and it may come when you are no longer demanding it. The fact that you have not dreamed of your sibling does not mean they love you less. It does not mean you are blocked, or broken, or doing grief wrong. It means only that the dream has not come yet.
A few practical things I learned along the way:
- Keep a journal by the bed. A small notebook, a pen, a flashlight or your phone. The first sixty seconds after waking are when the dream is sharpest. Write down anything — a phrase, a place, a feeling — before you reach for the day.
- Record everything, not just the dreams of your sibling. Other dreams will tell you things about your grief that you would not otherwise know. A dream is, as Jung said, a small door into the deepest rooms of the soul.
- Don’t insist on interpretation. Some dreams want to be understood. Others just want to be felt. There is no rule that says you have to know what a dream meant in order for it to have meant something.
- Share the ones you can. Telling a grief partner or trusted friend about a dream often deepens it, the way speaking a poem aloud changes it. Surviving siblings who hear each other’s dreams often find their own.
- And give up trying. If you are doing what I did — bargaining nightly with God, sleeping in headphones, drinking sleepy tea — let it go. Dreams are not summoned. They visit when they visit.
Whether or not you ever have one, please know this: your sibling is not measured by dreams. The bond you carry is not contingent on a nighttime visitation. The love is already there, awake and in waking life, every day, whether or not you remember sleeping.