Thread: Recurring Dreams

I was saddened to hear about the loss of your daughter. I hope you will find healing.

Please know that dreaming of one’s child dying is normal and it is not always prophetic. Much of the time that parents dream their child has died, the death has a symbolic meaning rather than a literal meaning. Sometimes this dream occurs because the child has begun to exhibit some area of independence (walking, first day at preschool, getting her driver’s license and etc...). The subconscious replays this new “independence” in dreams as some form of moving away from the parent. Sometimes this moving away/independence is replayed as death.

Another possibility is that your nightmare hill was symbolic of some difficult “obstacle” that you had experienced with your daughter. Her falling death symbolically meant that you believed you had not “protected” her from something related to the obstacle that had to be climbed. Or that your daughter had “failed” in some way related to the obstacle.

The “ending” of some event in your life could have also triggered your nightmares of your child “ending”. Also, the earlier dreams of your child dying may have been symbolic of something ending “prematurely”. Was your daughter a preemie or had many childhood illnesses and you worried about her health immensely? This stress would have remained in your subconscious for many years and continued to replay in a scrambled, symbolic way.

When the events in our lives get very stressful, our dreams will also become very stressful (terrible things happen in them). Your dream of hitting your daughter and seeing blood come from her mouth could mean many things. It may not have been prophetic. When we verbally argue with someone, our dreams sometimes replay that
argument. The dream may show us striking that same person that in real life only our words or our actions “struck”.

If you were intensely worried about your daughter (for whatever reasons) during her life, then your subconscious concentrated mostly on your daughter (in your dreams) and therefore, you did not dream of your son.

I have been thinking about your belief that your nightmares were prophetic. Intense emotional pain and despondency accompanies the death of one’s child. Does believing that theses nightmares were prophetic coincide with incorrectly thinking that somehow you should have known that your daughter was going to commit suicide and therefore, prevented it? I hope and pray that you have supportive family/friends to talk with and comfort you.

Recurring dreams are a pretty safe sign that the person dreaming it has not fully coped with something that happened and should work on it again in real life. In your case, it's quite obvious.