Dream about my brother commiting suicide

Hi there,

A bit about myself first. Im male, early 40s, married, no children by choice, overweight, financially secure, happy at home and work.

The dream:

First of all, let me tell you that in real life, my brother died about 7 years ago from cancer. He was a great guy. We werent overly close but our relationship was good. Many many years ago in the past, he had tried to take his life during difficult times in his life twice but never in the way i dreamed.

Ok, last night i dreamed of my wife and i. We were with my brother. He was having some kind of difficulty but i dont recall what. We were giving him advice. We saw him several times over an unknown period of time. Couldve been days or weeks between seeing him but i feel like it was days. He didnt seem suicidal. The problem was not huge i dont think. In real life he was married to his 2nd wife after his first marraige ended in divorce
He had 3 kids. All adults when he died. Then, my wife and i were in a pub, quite a fancy place where celebrities go. My wife fell over and 2 footballers came over and smiled at me and her. Nobody offered to help her up. They just stood and smiled. I think one of them was the footballer robinho but dont know who the other was. I dont remember any more about that part of the dream. Then, on another day, we went to visit my brother. The house was quiet. Something didnt feel right. I wemt upstairs, checking rooms and calling for him. I opened the door of a spare bedroom (i should say that the house in the dream was not my brothers real life house, just a random house but in the dream it was his house). The room was dark but it was day time. I looked over to the window and saw him hanging from a rope. He was cleared dead. The curtains were drawn. He had deliberately faced the window . i only saw him from behind. He was dressed in a suit. He wouldnt normally wear a suit unless at a special occasion. I could only look for a second. I immediately gasped and left the room upset. My wife was on her way up the stairs. She could see from my face that something was wrong. I said to her "you know that thing weve been worried about? Well, its happened!" . In the dream, we hadnt been worried about this thkugh. I dont remember what happened next that day.

Next thing, i find myself in a long queue to get into a resteraunt. I think it might be the day after finding my brother. I was there to collect my brother and knew he was still up on the rope. I dont know why all of a sudden he was in this place instead of where i found him at home. The resteraunt was like a big public hall. There was a queue. I could see inside. There was what seemed to be a holding area. When you got to thee front of the queue, the lady asked you to wait. Once someone was taken from the holding area into the actual resteraunt, she let an equal number of people into the holding area. I remember worrying about how i was going to manage to get my brother down from the rope and get him out. I was worried about all the people too. I got to the front of the queue and i explained to the lady that i didnt want a table and that i just wanted to take my brother away. she was nice and took me round to a side section where he was hanging. The whole place had a churchy feeling about it. In real life, none of us are religious. He was there at the window but had turned around so i could see his face. His eyes and mouth were open. I remember being sad, wondering what was going through his mind in the moments leading up to this. The lady brought me clingfilm to wrap him in.

I woke up at this point.

I remember my dreams most nights but this one had me looking for an explanatio ofcthr meaning.

Thsnk you for reading.

My little disclaimer: Bear in mind this is only my opinion and that dream interpretation can depend a lot on knowing someone, because dreams are so personal. You are the only person capable of truly determining the meaning or nature of your own dreams, the rest of us can just do guesswork and get you thinking.

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It's a complex dream and there's a heavy baggage here in a way.

Seven is a number sometimes associated with change and cycle, so to me it's curious that's how long ago he actually passed away and maybe even your age is a multiple of seven at this point (42). Was your brother an older or younger sibling?

In the dream other things unrelated to your brother happen too, these could just be echoes of your waking life but the fact that your wife falls over and nobody helps her and then there's a theme about suicide regarding your brother suggests to me a general feeling of helplessness, maybe you're feeling unable to help someone lately or have some internal fear of a situation coming up that you won't be able to help with. Maybe something in your life is becoming difficult to cope with. Queuing also suggests a certain sense of restriction and you might have been anxious or impatient to get to the front, I don't know. Breaking up the queue (i.e. the order) would lead to making others upset even if there was a very good reason for you to do so.

Following that last meaning, it may be the case that there is a reason for either you or someone in your life to want to break up an established order to improve themselves or their life.

Although in the dream you and your wife had not "actually" been worried about your brother being suicidal, that doesn't mean that you couldn't have felt that way on some level internally. Not everything we think comes out as literal expressed thought or even emotion, which I could possibly think is why we dream about certain things. Regardless of this, you were obviously upset by your brother's suicide and sometimes even when we know about something, when it actually happens we still feel a certain way because of shock, maybe hoping we wouldn't have been taken by surprise on some level.

The living are often left to wonder what the final thoughts of the departed might have been, I think especially so in the case of suicide. In the dream, as your brother had not displayed any suicidal behaviour or thoughts you are trying to make sense of why he would have done it but these thoughts probably aren't you new to you since you must have wondered what was going in his head in waking life when he did attempt suicide in the past. And that's the thing, isn't it? Sometimes people don't tell us exactly what they're thinking, or feeling, even after traumatic and dramatic events. People tell us "I'm alright" with full confidence and a smile but internally they might be feeling very different; the front can exist either to try and protect others or simply because we don't expect others will understand how we feel.

So, there's a possibility you're unhappy with something but are telling others you're fine about it. Or perhaps you suspect that someone is doing this with you. Thinking of my own relationship, either of us will sometimes not talk about something that the other may have considered important, sometimes because we don't find a moment or think there's no point bothering the other about it. Having no idea what your relationship is like, maybe it is a good time to sit down quietly with your wife after a meal or something and just talk about things, anything, and see if any topics come up from either of you that haven't been discussed yet but that may be a source of worry for either of you.

Thinking about your brother in the dream more symbolically, the dead on some level represent different planes of thought and existence. His mouth is open (freedom to communicate) and his eyes are open (freedom of reception); he wears a suit as you say, perhaps celebrating something, maybe not about himself as a person. Maybe you've had some success in life recently but you should remain open to the future and put your own thoughts forward. And he hangs by the neck in the dream, I presume, so to me there's a sense of disconnecting mind (the head) from the rest of the body which may be limp, compared to the open expression of the face.

About the churchy feeling (also, queuing has some physical relation to procession). Regardless of you having faith or not, you are likely going to be aware that others around you do have that faith and there are many cultural stereotypes linking death and faith together; being given clingfilm (transparent?) to wrap your brother in, in an apparently holy place (but not) makes me think of mummification, i.e. preservation and in this case, an open preservation that allows a person to see what is being preserved with some clarity, versus if you had been given for example a black liner or a box to put your brother in. And going back to order in life, perhaps there's something cropping up that's worth preserving or dwelling on.

I think this is long enough without getting your own feedback on it; do let me know what you think of this. I hope other regular users will chip in and give their own different interpretations, I think the more the merrier, especially for such a dream.

CollaredDove, is this the first dream you have had with death in it ?
and, have you done your own search for the theme of death ?
so, your brother actually died of cancer, and yet you dream of him hanging by a rope.
hmmm.
did you know about his two attempts ?
were you and your close while growing up ?
perhaps this is your subconscious, or your dream self providing healing for what happened to your brother ..
is the date of dream, the anniversary of his death ?

Hi there, firstly I’m very sorry to hear about your brother. Though he passed 7 years ago Loss and grief do tend to linger with us and it’s probably why it still manifests in your dreams. Something that day maybe reminded you of him or about death or suicide and triggered the dream to occur. Even though he died of cancer it seems suicide is the prominent thing you associate with him. It’s certainly a complicated and emotional subject and I agree with Darkestdarkness in that I think maybe you’re still trying to understand and process why he once tried to take his life. Maybe you know, maybe you don’t but if it was my own brother I can imagine I would be going through a similar process of wanting to know why and what I could have done to help him. The dream is probably your imagined scenario of if your brother carried out the suicide and you were the one to find him. The fact he was wearing a suit and things felt like a church are maybe things you associate with the subject of death which makes sense.