Talking to the dead?

[MRH92]

About 2-3 months ago I was talking to my mum and a few family friends about lucid dreaming and although they expressed some interest they ultimately said "but it's not real" and refused to believe that a lucid dream could be anything like real life. This kind of annoyed me a little because I felt like they were shooting down some of my lucid experiences that I found to be very important. I continued to talk about it though and explained that for some people it's quite a spiritual thing and they believe you can dream share or contact people who have died (which is not my personal belief). Again they kinda didn't listen and looked at me like I was crazy so I said I would try and contact my great grandma, my mums grandma, and get her to tell me something I couldn't possibly know. Around the beginning of May I found my great grandma in a lucid dream and we spoke for a while. She told me to say hello to my mum and my auntie when I wake up. I asked her if she could tell me something I wouldn't know and she said she remembered helping my mum when she hurt her hand. I woke not long after this and was a little disappointed. To me that didn't really seem like anything big. It seemed stupid. I concluded that I didn't really speak to my dead great grandma and instead it was just my subconscious and nothing more than a dream. I didn't bother sharing this with my mum because I felt she would just laugh at it. Anyway I told her about the dream last night and she seemed interested. Then I got to the part about my great grandma helping my mum when she hurt her hand. She just stared at me for ages and then said "Yeah but I must have told you about that." I was really confused. She then showed me a scar from when she put her hand in some glass as a very young child. I had never known that. Now I'm still not saying I really talked to my great grandma. After all a grandma helping her grandchild is a pretty standard thing. I'm sure we've all had that experience. Still I find this to be pretty interesting and if there's one good thing to come out of this my mum no longer thinks lucid dreaming is stupid

[Linkzelda]

Talking to late relatives in our dreams to me is a matter of wishful thinking pertaining to the dream character we're seeing is us being able to really contact their "soul/spirit/psyche" vs. our subconscious being able to have a near-perfect projection of the totality of their being, which can often lead to things that seem accurate because of familial roots. Since familial roots would obviously be more ingrained (if you were to assume we could "access" our kinship's genetic code, etc.), the experiences would lead to almost to perfectly accurate descriptions when we explain it to our family members. Maybe you heard about a few things as a child, but never really bothered to remember since those things probably were shifted somewhere deep in the realms of your mind, and when you start getting used to being more empathetic and thoughtful of your late family members, your mind was able to connect and make a decent conjecture. Maybe it's possible for us to know the history of our families in our dreams, seeing as we're tied to them by genetics, but again, it's a matter of seeing it as "Talking to the Dead" or "Talking to a Near-Perfect Projection of the sum total of what we and others knew about them).

[MRH92]

Yes. The memory that my great grandma mentioned wasn't exactly significant. I could have been using one of my own experiences. Perhaps a time when my own grandma helped me when I hurt myself and I projected that memory into this image of my great grandma. Like I said I don't believe I contacted her. I don't believe in an afterlife so of course I don't think I contacted her. I just thought the whole experience was rather interesting.

[Scionox]

Interesting experience, indeed may have been that you subconsciously knew it in some way, it's nice though that you got your mom to think better about lucid dreaming, maybe you can even get her to lucid dream one day.

[ParadoxOwl]

Very interesting, I dont particularly beleive in it but at the same time its something I would be really interested looking into, I'm trying to keep my mind open to everything no matter how rediculas it may sound.