Who comes to us in dreams when we experience loss? When grief breaks open our sense of identity, continuity, and meaning, many people report that dreams take on a different quality – more vivid, more emotional, and sometimes profoundly relational. In these dream spaces, figures appear who seem to guide, comfort, or orient us through unfamiliar terrain. Across cultures, these figures have been called psychopomps: guides of souls, companions between worlds.
Can dreams help with grief?
In a recent podcast episode of Dream Boat, Laura Payne, a psychotherapist and teacher at the Dream Research Institute (DRI) in London, UK, interviews Linda Mastrangelo, a California-based psychotherapist and Director for the Institute for Dream Studies, whose work focuses on grief, bereavement, and dreams. Linda’s approach offers a nuanced and compassionate framework for understanding how dreams can function not just as reflections of inner life, but as maps through grief itself.
Linda makes an important distinction between grief dreams and visitation dreams. Grief dreams often carry the raw emotional material of loss – anger, guilt, regret, confusion. They may revisit unresolved moments or express feelings that feel taboo or difficult to hold in waking life. Visitation dreams, by contrast, are often experienced as deeply relational. People report encounters with those who have died that feel peaceful, vivid, and emotionally complete. These dreams are frequently described not as symbolic but as experienced as real, offering comfort, reassurance, or a sense of continued connection.
What makes this approach especially compelling is that it does not rush to explain these experiences away. Instead, dreams can be seen as a nonlinear map – one that reflects the way grief itself unfolds. Grief does not move in stages or timelines; it reshapes identity. Who am I now, without this person? Dreams, Linda suggests, help us navigate that identity shift by allowing emotions, relationships, and meanings to reorganize in ways that language often cannot.
This perspective resonates deeply with research and practice emerging from the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), particularly the dreamwork of Garret Yount, PhD, and Dr. Helané Wahbeh’s channeling research. In her research, Helané has explored the kinds of experiences people describe when they feel they’re receiving information from beyond their traditional five senses or usual sense of self – including contact with “guides” or other nonordinary sources of insight – and how these experiences can be approached with both openness and scientific rigor.
In the context of grief, that matters: when a dream figure feels like a wise presence rather than a memory fragment, it can be meaningful to hold the experience without collapsing it into either “definitely real” or “definitely imagined.” This orientation is especially useful – honoring lived experience while staying grounded in careful interpretation, ethical sensitivity, and psychological care.
Why do dreams feel real?
Garret’s research explores dreams as a domain of noetic experience – states of consciousness in which information, insight, and meaning arise without linear reasoning. From this view, dreams are not merely byproducts of brain activity, but potential portals into a larger field of consciousness. Garret emphasizes that the power of dreams lies in their emotional truth. Dreams communicate through feeling, imagery, and relationship rather than argument or narrative. This aligns with Linda’s observation that it is often the felt sense of visitation dreams – the quality of presence, love, or resolution – that carries their healing potential, regardless of how one interprets their ontological status.
Both Linda’s work and Garret’s research point to dreams as a uniquely accessible entry point into noetic experience. Everyone dreams. Unlike altered states that require specific training or substances, dreams arrive uninvited. Yet engaging them with openness, curiosity, and integrity can deepen our capacity to engage the world more fully. Linda speaks of “coming out as a dreamer” – allowing dreams to be taken seriously as sources of guidance and meaning. Garret similarly frames dreamspace as a way of “entering a bigger stream of consciousness,” where personal experience intersects with something more collective or transpersonal.
All of this work and research situates dreaming as an access point to broader aspects of consciousness beyond mere neural activity. In this way, dreaming – especially when approached with curiosity and care – can be understood as a form of noetic experience: direct, meaningful contact with information or imagery that arises beyond the everyday sense of “self.”
This convergence also raises important ethical questions. Many people who seek meaning in dreams are grieving, vulnerable, or searching for reassurance. As noted in the podcast, it’s important to hold dreams gently, without imposing interpretation or certainty. This ethical sensitivity mirrors ongoing conversations at IONS around integrity in channeling, psi experiences, and communication with the deceased. Dreams, like other noetic experiences, require care, humility, and respect for the dreamer’s autonomy and emotional state.
It also connects with Steven Ferrara’s Grief to Gratitude work, which emphasizes that grief isn’t something we “solve” – it’s something we metabolize through relationship, meaning-making, and compassionate support over time. From that lens, dreams can become one more place where continuing bonds are felt and integrated: not as proof, but as lived experience that can soften isolation and help a person stay connected to love while adjusting to loss.
When dreamwork is held with care – emotionally, ethically, and psychologically – it can support the same arc Steven points toward: moving with grief in a way that preserves tenderness and restores a sense of inner ground.
Dreams may not offer closure in the conventional sense. But they often offer something quieter and more sustaining: a way to remain in relationship, to feel accompanied, and to sense continuity amid change. In that way, dreams may function as quiet psychopomps themselves – guiding us gently and repeatedly across the thresholds of loss, identity, and love.
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Linda Mastrangelo, MA, LMFT is a psychotherapist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area (lightningtreetherapy.com), specializing in grief, loss, and dreams, particularly informed by her work in hospice care. She is the Executive Director and Lead Faculty for the Institute for Dream Studies (InstituteforDreamStudies.org) and a professor of Consciousness and Transformative Studies at John F. Kennedy University (now National University).
A prolific dreamer since childhood, Linda discovered early the profound potential of dreams as “good medicine.” Her work bridges depth psychology, ancestral healing, and intergenerational trauma, engaging dreamwork as a living, relational practice of descent. Rooted in the initiatory Orphic mysteries and the sacred dream traditions of her Italian lineage, she approaches dreams as chthonic thresholds—portals into the underworld dimensions of psyche where grief, death, and soul intersect.
An advocate of the death awareness movement, Linda has hosted Death Cafés and community gatherings that invite courageous, compassionate conversation. Her work seeks to break the taboo surrounding death, foster open dialogue, and promote a nonpathologizing approach to grief and end-of-life care.
Linda has also served on the Board of Directors for the International Association for the Study of Dreams. She has presented her work internationally and has written for publications like The Shift Network, GoodTherapy, SUFI magazine, DreamTime, and the book Sleep Monsters and Superheroes, particularly focusing on grief, death, initiation, and psychopompic dreams.
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Nina Fry-Kizler, MA, is Senior Designer of Experiential Programs and the Science Liaison with the research team at IONS. Nina infuses cutting-edge research into our experiential programs. As a former professor at John F. Kennedy University in the Holistic Health Education Masters Program for over a decade, Nina taught classes on the psychology and physiology of stress, the challenges of change/transformation, energy models of healing, and mind-body medicine.
In her work at IONS, Nina has developed curriculum and assets, facilitated, managed, and taught courses such as The Possibility Accelerator Experience, The Science-Based Process of Manifesting Your Dreams, Noetics 101: The Science and Experience of Interconnection, The Science of Channeling, and Worldview Explorations, among others.
