Hello and welcome to Dear grief guide.
A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost, stuck,
heartbroken or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.
My name is Shelby Fercitya.
I'm a grief coach and author and I'm here to help you create a life you love from the
life lost forced you to live.
Let's get to today's letter.
Dear grief guide, I recently lost my dad to cancer.
For the last month or so I keep having different iterations of the same traumatizing dream.
The overarching concept of my dream is that I know my dad has passed but I am informed
that he has come back to life, whether that be in the funeral home or back in his house
where I was a caregiver for him.
He doesn't come back to life healthy in every dream he is in the final phases of his life
reliving his last days.
I am aware that he has died in real life but my dream self is forced to relive him struggling
in his final hours a few times I've even heard him calling my name.
While some might think it's comforting to see their dead person come back to life in
a dream I promise you it's not.
I feel sick when I wake up.
It also brings all the emotions to the surface again.
I keep having this awful grief dream.
It leaves me feeling disoriented and heartbroken and emotionally hung over as if I'm trapped
in a never ending night time replay of his final days on earth.
What do these dreams mean and how do I stop them?
It's been heartbreaking to have to relive his final days on repeat when I'm trying so
hard to just get some rest.
You have any advice on how to cope with these dreams and find some relief.
My bed has become a place that I dread.
Signed No More Nightmares.
Hi there, No More Nightmares.
I so deeply resonate with your story of having nightmares over and over and over again
of your person dying.
This was an experience that I had after the death of my mother.
I was not home when she died.
I was having lunch with my girlfriend at the time.
It was one of the few times I left the house.
I chose to be away from her as she was dying for my sanity, for my mental and emotional
health, for my need as a 21 year old newly queer out in the world person to be seen and
loved and validated and just companion in the world for a second to feel "normal."
And my girlfriend and I at the time were having sandwiches and french fries at my favorite
childhood diner.
And after we paid the bill and as we were leaving the booth, I got a call from my dad.
By the time I picked up the phone, we were walking in the parking lot and he told me my mom died.
For my knees hit the pavement, I was in the way of cars and people and I immediately started
whaling that she was gone.
And for months and years, I had similar recurring grief dreams over and over and over again.
That someone in my life, someone I knew delivered the news to me that she had died.
And each time in the dream, the news was fresh.
It was as if I was receiving it for the first time.
And I received this news from dream people who I did high school theater with.
I received it from family members, I received it from old co-workers and it made sleeping
and waking.
Just awful experiences.
And I like you dread it going to sleep every night because I didn't know what to expect
on the other side of my closed eyes.
So I deeply resonate with this experience.
Many, many people have grief dreams.
Not a lot of people talk about it, but many people have grief dreams, both dreams that they
would consider positive and connecting and affirming and validating and loving.
And all of these wonderful things that you want to be associated with having a grief dream.
And many other people have grief dreams that are, if I can put a very fine point on it, torture
to endure.
One of the other people I'm thinking of in this moment is the author Cheryl Strait whose
book Wilde made a great impact on me after my mother's death.
And she describes after the death of her own mother having dreams where she was forced to
kill her mother over and over and over again, different methods, different ways I will not
go into graphic details here.
But imagine all the ways there are to die.
And that is what she had to do to her mother in dreams.
She later, in a podcast episode of Dear Sugars, which is her advice podcast that inspired
this one, said that she thought it was her brain's way of trying to make sense of the loss, to
make sense of something that should never make sense at all.
And this is what I wonder might be happening with you too.
No more nightmares is your brain trying its damnedest to make any sort of sense, any sort
of storyline, any sort of comprehension over or about the loss that has happened to you.
It's as if there is this logical half of you.
I know my dad has passed.
I know he's no longer here.
I lived through that reality and waking life.
And then there's this other half of you that's like, but maybe he's still alive.
Maybe I need to watch him die one more time in order for it to sink in.
Maybe I need to receive the news again from a funeral home director or a hospice professional
or somebody at the hospital or a relative or a friend or family member.
Maybe I need to relive this one more time in order for it to make sense.
But what I think might be important to you is not why it's happening.
You're like, yeah, sure, my brain needs to make sense of the loss to do whatever you need
to do brain, but oh my god, sleep is now a hellscape for me.
What do I do about that?
One of my very, very dear friends named Joshua Black hosts a podcast called Grave Dreams.
A lot of podcast recommendations on this one.
Y'all go listen to dear sugars, go listen to Grave Dreams.
He actually has a PhD in Grave Dreams.
And he is, to my knowledge, one of the only humans alive who has dedicated his entire
life to studying the dreams we have after someone we know or someone we love dies.
Both beautiful, connecting, visitations and validations and nightmares.
One of my favorite pieces of advice that he offers, especially for people having grief
nightmares in the aftermath of a loss, is to, for 30 days, so you have to commit to this,
no more nightmares.
For 30 days, keep a journal by your bed or record audio messages.
I think you can get the same effect either way.
And before you go to sleep, set a timer for one to five minutes.
However long you feel you can write and concentrate in this season of your life and write a perfect
dream that you would like to have with your dad.
This can involve a beautiful memory you shared while he was in life.
This can involve you going to visit him in the afterlife if that's something that you
believe in.
This can involve you two having a healing conversation about something you didn't get to finish
on earth.
This could be just the two of you in a beautiful place, hugging, sitting together, doing a shared
activity, no talking whatsoever.
Whatever it is, conjure up right down or record your voice speaking, your ideal dream.
And he says, Joshua Black says, that doing this practice, storytelling your perfect dream,
especially with the timing right before you go to bed, it helps your brain associate that
time with positive memories of your dad so that it is more likely that that is the experience
you are going to have in a dream.
Now this doesn't erase nightmares entirely.
It can't.
No one can guarantee that that's the outcome.
This is going to have.
But what it does is it starts to crowd out your brain's association with bed equals dreams
equals nightmares equals sorrow equals pain.
With a different story, it's bed equals remembering equals reminiscing equals loving equals connection
equals dreaming equals hoping equals comforting.
Insert your own adjective here to describe the experience of what sort of dream you'd
like to have with or about your dad in sleeping time.
And that is the dream that you can slowly make true for yourself.
Again, you won't be a hundred out of a hundred on this.
You may still have grief dreams and nightmares, especially when big milestones or anniversaries,
death days, birthdays, things like that appear in your life, especially if something in your
waking life activates your grief in a big or significant way.
Those grief dreams are just unpredictable altogether and there is a great sense of powerlessness
in that.
And also, from what he has studied and from what I know to be true about grief dreams as
well, is that if you want to have good ones, you have to put in just a little bit of work
to imagine what a good grief dream might look like because especially right now so much
of what you might perceive grief dreams to be is all sad, all bad, all terror.
And that's heartbreaking.
And so this is my invitation to you to imagine a new way of dreaming where your dad is still
the subject of your dreams, but in a wildly different way.
So I hope you'll try this.
The last thing I want to offer you is a wonderful free meditation app called Insight Timer.
And this is a place where I host meditations, generally episodes of my podcasts that you
can find on there for free, but you can search by meditation type meditation style.
You can choose music or no music.
You can choose male or female oriented voices.
You can choose length and duration.
I want five minutes.
I want two hours of being suspended in a space of someone's calming voice of calming music.
And I cannot tell you, you can choose bedtime stories where they give you props to visualize
what you would like to experience as you fall asleep.
I cannot tell you how many nights as my loved ones were sick or dying or in the loneliness
of my own grief after their death that I leaned on this resource for help.
Sleep sadly, nighttime sadly is one of the most often reported times of loneliness and
isolation for grieving people and sometimes just having another voice in the room telling
you that sleep is okay, that relaxing is safe, that there may be beautiful dreams waiting
for you is what you need in order to let go of consciousness and allow yourself to get
some rest.
No more nightmares.
I wish that to be reality for you.
May you know peaceful nights in the future.
May you have dreams of your dad that feel restorative and connecting and comforting and healing
to your heart.
And may you write me again and let me know how it all turned out.
I am sending you so much love and waking life and in sleep.
Good luck.
That's all for this episode of Dear Grave Guide.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're feeling lost, stuck, heartbroken or overwhelmed in the midst of your own grief,
check out my free workshop Grow Through Grave.
Free ways to stop feeling stuck and start moving forward.
I'll give you three easy, actionable tools for navigating life after loss and show you
how you can create peace, stability and compassion right there in the middle of grief's confusion
and uncertainty.
You can find the workshop link in the show notes.
If this podcast helped you feel a little less alone in your grief, please subscribe and
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And be sure to share Dear Grave Guide with a friend because you'll never know what someone
you love is going through.
You can submit your anonymous letter for the show and find additional grief support at
shelbyforsitia.com.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Ruth Spence of
Celebio.
Until next time, I see you.
I am so proud of you and the work that you're doing in the world and I love you because even
through grief, we are growing.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Eddie Goldstein.