You dreamed about them. Maybe they were alive and everything was fine — you were talking, laughing, doing something ordinary. And then you woke up and lost them again.
Or maybe the dream was the other kind. The kind where you find them. The kind that replays what happened, or invents something worse. The kind you wake up from shaking.
Both kinds are normal. Both kinds are your brain doing something with a loss it can't make sense of while you're awake.
The dreams where they're alive and things are okay are one of the most common experiences after losing someone. Your sleeping brain is working through the loss, and sometimes that looks like a visit. They're sitting at the kitchen table. You're walking together somewhere. They say something you needed to hear.
These dreams can feel like a gift and a punishment in the same breath. Because for a few minutes, you had them back. And then waking up took them away again. That second loss — the one that happens every morning after a dream like that — is its own kind of grief.
Some people find comfort in these dreams. Some people dread them. Some people desperately want to have them and can't. All of that is normal.
Trauma dreams are different. They don't feel like a visit — they feel like a re-enactment. They might replay the moment you got the phone call, or the moment you found them, or a version of events your brain has invented that's even worse than what actually happened. You wake up with your heart pounding and the images still behind your eyes.
After a death by suicide, trauma dreams are common in the first weeks and months. Your brain is trying to process something overwhelming, and sleep is when it does its heaviest work. The dreams aren't a sign that you're getting worse. They're a sign that your brain is working on something it hasn't been able to resolve.
If the trauma dreams are happening most nights for weeks, it's worth mentioning to a GP or counsellor. Sometimes your brain gets stuck in a loop with these, and there are approaches that can help it move through.
There's a third category that nobody talks about: the dreams where they're alive but something is wrong. They're distant. They're angry. They won't look at you. You're trying to reach them and you can't. These aren't comfort dreams or trauma dreams — they're your dreaming brain working through unresolved feelings. Guilt, anger, helplessness, the things you never got to say.
These dreams can hit harder than the bad ones, because they feel like a message. Like they're trying to tell you something. But they're not a message. They come from your mind, not from the person you lost. And knowing that doesn't help much at 4am.
You can't control what you dream. You can't summon the comfort dreams or banish the trauma ones. What you can do is let yourself have them without judging what they mean.
A dream where they're angry at you doesn't mean they were angry at you. A dream where you saved them doesn't mean you could have saved them. A dream where they told you they're okay doesn't mean they're sending you a message — but if believing that helps you, there's no harm in it.
The dreams will change over time. They'll come less often, or they'll shift in tone, or they'll stop waking you up. That's not forgetting. That's your brain slowly finding a place to put what happened.