Real Ghost Story: Dreaming With The Dead – When I was in my early twenties, I had a very vivid dream that my grandfather was visiting me. I remember lying in bed partially sitting up on one elbow when he came to me. When I saw him I said “Huelo, you’re here!” (Huelo was the name we called him as a nick name for abuelo). He answered “Yes, I am. I have to tell you something.” “But you’re dead”. “I know. I have to tell you something”. He was his usual self that I remembered, no nonsense, straight to the point. While I’m looking at him I can see a family member, Vidal, that had long passed standing in the background waiting for my grandfather to finish. They were very close friends, not just relatives.
He told me to take care of my mother because her heart and lungs would fail her. He kept repeating “it’s pulmonary. Los pulmones. It’s pulmonary”. He didn’t mention anything more about her heart and left.
I woke up sitting halfway up resting on my elbow just as I had been in my dream. Aside from being such a freaky dream being so realistic, I could smell him, in my sheets, my night gown and my hair. At the time my only thought was that it was nothing more than a very vivid dream. I went back to sleep and in the morning I told my grandmother about it. She told me she dreamt of her parents all the time. They would ask how her health was, if she was watching her blood sugar, etc., real things that had developed long after they passed. So it’s just a dream, we left it at that.
About 2 or 3 years later, my mother is having surgery. My father told me “We had a big scare with your mother today. She stopped breathing and they had to intubate her”. My heart stopped andimmediately remembered that dream and my grandfather focusing on her lungs. Many years later she passed from congestive heart failure.
He visited me one other time after the birth of my daughter to tell me how beautiful she was and to take good care of her. Vidal was there too, waiting for my grandfather like before. He waved and winked, and then they were gone. Once again, when I woke up I could smell him.
Another time, I’m taking a nap and I dream that a friend of my parents that I hadn’t seen in many years came to me to tell me he had died. He was so happy about it! “Guess what? I died!” I was rather shocked and just said “Oh, OK. Thanks” (because hearing that is weird). I told my parents about it and we thought it was odd, but just a dream. A few weeks later we found out that he had indeed passed around the same time as my dream.
I dreamt one night that an old boyfriend, a very bad abusive boyfriend from over 30 years ago, came to me. He was very standoffish, stammered a little and said “sorry if I hurt you, Shorty”. Again I thought weird vivid dream except for I didn’t feel afraid of him as I did when I would randomly see him out and about. A few months later an old friend asked me if I heard Robert Earl had died. She’s extremely religious and I only said I had heard about it. If I told her the truth she would have tried to exorcise me!
Last year my cousin was going through a very difficult time and relied on her Catholic faith to get her through it. She was saying novenas day and night. Several times a week she would find random pennies around her house in areas that moments before there was none. She felt it was a sign of acknowledgment and that her brother Larry, who had passed, was somehow involved. After her crisis was over, I dreamt of him. He was playing pool with a friend – which was a favorite past time of his. He was about to take his shot when turned around and said “hi”, turned back to the table, then back to me again and said “hey, tell Beck I said hi”. Again just another dream. In the morning I went out to my backyard to have a smoke and what do I find? A penny.