Weird Grandfather Dream

Hey everyone,

Im new to this website, and really love using it, so i finally decided to make myself an account to request help with a dream interpretation.

Basically, my grandfather died 4 years ago of a degenerative brain disease. By this i mean that the more time went on, the more he lost his motor abilities, essentially passing away in a vegetative state.

Now for the dream. So i started off sitting at a table with my whole family including him. He was in bad shape, similar to the way he was before being completely disabled by his illness. Conversation was happening all around, and my grandfather seemed to be becoming more alive as it went on. He started moving and even walking after some time. I remember the dream flashing to another scene where he was running around a familiar neighborhood with me running and following behind. Eventually he ran across a street, and got clipped by a speeding car in the hip. The dreamed flashed again, and i was at his funeral which wasn't the same as the one he had in real life. I cant recall anymore from this dream, however one last detail is that it was fall. Not sure if that is relevant.

Please help me, ive been having weird dreams of babys being born from my mother and now this.... Not sure what it all means but i know it cant be insignificant.

Thanks for taking the time to read my stuff :D

Hm, I think that this dream is more about how you miss him. I feel like it also had a lot to do with you feeling like his life was stolen from him. You wish that you had more time with him.

Or, your grandfather is symbolizing something in your waking life.

Although in order to provide a more accurate interpretation it would usually be best to have some additional general background information about you (and a description of events just before the dream), it looks like there could be a need to get back in touch with an important part of your personality as represented by your late grandfather.

Your family conversing around the table might be an image that’s emphasizing how a kind of centering influence is needed to join together various aspects of yourself (the family) into a tighter and cohesive wholeness.

That is, something might recently have stirred up several “points of view” and conflicting potentials etc. etc. which need to somehow become more organized. Alternatively, you might have reached a certain age or a general turning point etc. which has stimulated inner needs to appear related to fulfilling your basic capacities etc.

Assuming that your grandfather was a positive influence on you, he probably symbolizes a certain “wise” part of yourself, a centre of your personality which contains your unique potential as an individual overall.

As mentioned, some kind of recent incident or situation etc. might have brought this part of you “back to life” in a way, and it now needs to be guided and controlled reasonably well.

For example, your grandfather gathers strength and begins running through the neighborhood with you “following behind”, probably representing that you need instead to “take the lead” and be able to control the situation of where various interests and emotions etc. are going.

If not, an apparently new and positive yearning for self-development might “take a hit” and be “killed” by over-extending yourself or some other problem.

The dream takes place in the fall which is a season of transition. The “winter” that could follow, which is related to the task of making your potentials real in the outside world, might be relatively more or less demanding.

The dreams about your mother having babies also suggest the theme of the potential “new growth” of your personality as stirred up by your psyche which is probably symbolized by your mother.

Symbolically, the “babies” need care, attention, protection and nurturing in order to grow strong.

Anyway as mentioned, without knowing anything much about you, this way of looking at your important dream might not fit your personal circumstances very well, but I hope that these ideas can be helpful in some way.

Please make any comments or ask any questions about this interpretation that you’d like to.

Thanks to both of you for replying to my thread! So much information and a lot of it looks like it could fit with me. As for the background information, i will post it here and on my original post if youre still interested in helping me interpret these dreams. :)

Background info: I'm a 19 year old male. Ive been having a rough time in college ever since the beginning, however my grades are definitely changing and skyrocketing. I'm in a relationship that i continuously question, but still enjoy most of the time. i have one younger sister and a mother and father. I would describe myself a someone who is rather active and friendly. I would consider myself spiritual in a sense, but not religious. I've reached a point in life where I turned to science for answers as it is my field of stufy. I havent got any odd events leading up to this dream. Mostly just a normal day beforehand. However ive been dreaming more and more, and my dreams seem to be getting more real even if i cant realize im in a dream while it is happening.

From what you’ve written, it looks like a combination of factors exists wherein you’ve hit upon a formula that has released your potentials somewhat (e.g. your grades are now skyrocketing), but since you’re at a very important transitional point in your life, it also looks like there’s a need to somehow balance out what’s happening as you move forward.

Dreams are often harder to interpret than they seem to be on the surface, so all that can be said is that your dream seems to reflect the idea that an important aspect of your unique personality (symbolized by your grandfather) has indeed “come alive”, but on the other hand, there are apparently some issues that could get out of hand (e.g. your grandfather gets hit by a car and dies).

For example, your leaning towards the scientific, while it appears to be a very important aspect of your personality, might potentially lead to problems if the spiritual side you mentioned is gradually left too far behind.

Also, a drift away from paying enough attention to ethics, values and emotions, which tends to be very common in our technologically-orientated society, might result in relationship issues which you’ve apparently already had a taste of.

In addition, being active and friendly are very valuable traits which will help you in the future as long as you’re able to maintain an equally good relationship with your inner world, as it were.

Along these lines, it’s possible that even the fact that you’re remembering more of your dreams, which are very vivid, could be nature’s attempt already to make sure you keep in touch with this “inner world” of your psyche in order to balance things out.

The problem is that you’re actually not dreaming more, but only remembering more of the dreams that are happening.

There’s a cycle which consists of deep sleep which rises to a lighter sleep where dreams occur, then deep sleep returns.

We all have about 5-6 dreams per night, so the idea is that your sleep is tending to be lighter overall and you’re apparently tending to wake more often after each dream. Since college is a very busy place, not getting deep enough sleep could tend to catch up with you over time.

This might also tie in with a need to get some regular exercise to reduce tension and to sleep better overall.

Doing so would also help to keep you in touch with your body as opposed to staying in the mind too much because of your studies which can happen in a college setting.

Your dream might have been touching on this issue because, generally speaking, a vehicle in dreams (whether a truck, car, bicycle, ship or aircraft etc.) represents a complex mix of the physical body along with the dreamer’s interests, drives, wishes and beliefs etc. etc.

So it symbolizes a kind of body-and-mind mix with which the person moves through daily life.

In this way of looking at your dream, the reinvigorated development of your true self (e.g. your grandfather is running through the neighborhood) gets hit by a “stronger movement of energy” (the car) which “kills” the movement towards the development of your genuine self.

The danger could be that those things which are needed to “slow you down” and make you more balanced and complete (e.g. paying attention to your feelings, spiritual needs and your body etc.) might come to be seen as “things that are in the way” of your future “success”.

If so, this is a very common situation in modern society and it takes fortitude to kind of go against the flow and try to be well-rounded at least to a reasonable degree.

Since you’re interested in science but also have a spiritual side, you might be interested in a book called “Man and his Symbols”, edited by the famous psychiatrist, Carl Jung.

This book was directed to the general public, and the last thing that Carl Jung ever wrote appears as the first chapter. His chapter looks at approaching the unconscious, dreams and symbols in a very engaging and practical way which you might find helpful, although it has to be said that the current paperback edition isn’t much to look at.

One of the main things about Carl Jung is that he believed that psychology is both an art and a science, contrary to today’s main theory about it’s being mostly about “brain science”. So you might find his approach of uniting the spiritual/meaning side of life with a scientific approach to be apt for your particular outlook overall.

In any case, I hope that these additional ideas can be helpful, and please don’t hesitate to ask any questions.