Thread: Please help my daughter understand this dream

Hello. Here are some ideas that may help. The war zone illustrates how your daughter is feeling - in war, we are frightened - especially of death, and maybe this is your daughter's first experience of the death of a loved one. Being that close to another person's death can also bring our own mortality into stark relief, so her grandma's death most likely has made her confront her worst fears about her own death. War can also represent conflict, and it is possible your daughter is feeling many conflicting emotions, overwhelming love and grief but possibly also anger (how could she have left me? this is so unfair? etc) and possible also "hate', (I hate grandma for dying, I hate death for taking grandma, I hate everyone else who is alive while my grandma is dead).
So, the fear of someone else she loves dying is represented by the "family have taken shelter" - in her dream she is trying to make her family safe. But her grandma is still missing - she can (almost) see in "in the distance", but when she gets there, her grandma morphs into a stranger. This could be her trying to understand death and what it is. Her grandma, who she knew and loved as a solid person, is suddenly no longer there, but where is she? what has she become? In your daughter's dream, her grandma has become the most different person to who she was alive - instead of being a woman who loves your daughter, she is a man who is a total stranger. I think this could be your daughter trying to reframe how she sees her grandma who has been so dramatically changed by death.
Her heart-wrenching cry of "I'm hallucinating" is another way of saying "this can't be real". Again, I think it represents your daughter's confusion over her grandma's transformation; she doesn't want it to be true. She wants to find out that she is suddenly "hallucinating" and really her grandma is still alive and everything is as it was.

Just a couple of other things - I don't know anymore than you have posted so I have tried to stick with that but depending on what else has happened in your family, the dream might also be referring to other things. For instance, you haven't mentioned your daughter's father. If he too has passed particularly when your daughter was young or even if he just left then and she hasn't seen him for a long time, then that would be another explanation of why her grandma turns into the strange man because, she, like he did, has left her. The war, might also represent conflict within the family. Again, if your daughter's experience with her father has not been good, he could be represented by the strange man.

It might help your daughter to reimagine this dream while awake and in control, and see herself running to her grandma who turns and hugs her close, and says something like "I love you but I have to go and you have to stay for now, but I will always love you and keep watch over you." Something like that or in whatever words you and she use about people who have passed. She may want to talk about death, and what happens afterwards, and she, I'm pretty sure, needs reassuring about her own safety.

I am sorry for your loss. I hope this has helped a little.