Can Dreams Provide Symbolic Hints of an Afterlife?

In the paper here we have an example of an alleged "scientific consensus" that is completely contrary to my own experience. We read this:

"There is a relatively broad consensus, based on results from both survey and laboratory studies, that the capacity to recall dreams decreases with age (for reviews see Funkhouser et al., 1999; Guenole et al., 2010). One early study of 17- to 70-year-old college-educated participants (n = 295) found that dream recall frequency (DRF) was at its highest level (9.8 dreams/month) in the late teens, progressively lower at ages 30–39 (6.1/month), 40–49 (4.2/month), and 50–59 (3.7/month) and then somewhat higher again at ages 60–69 (4.5/month; Herman and Shows, 1983)." 

Such factoids are quite contrary to my own experience, because although I am in one of these older age groups, I have been able to recall and log an average of about 100 dreams per month (to make a very rough estimate). My almost-daily-updated post "I Keep Dreaming About Danger, Death and Life After Death" is by now one of the largest dream journals that can be found anywhere online.  Dream journals in chronological order tend to be very hard-to-read because of all the dream-to-dream variation.  My dream log has avoided such a problem by avoiding chronological order, and organizing all the dreams into five  categories:

(1) Dreams I had of danger.

(2) Dreams I had with an explicit death reference (such as someone dying or some mention of death).

(3) Dreams I had in which death seemed to be symbolized.

(4) Dreams I had that seemed to refer to life-after-death, often in an indirect or symbolic way. 

(5) Dreams I had in which some deceased person appeared or was mentioned. 

The dreams of danger are not terribly noteworthy, as danger is a common theme in dreams. What is very noteworthy is the very high repetition of themes of life-after-death in my dreams. Since starting to log my dreams in November 2020,  I have had more than 270 dreams that seemed to refer to life after death.  This is not counting more than 400 dreams I have had referring to or involving deceased people. Counting both dreams that seemed to refer to life after death and dreams in which a deceased person appeared or was mentioned, I have had more than 670 dreams in the past two years that either seemed to refer to life after death or referred to (or had in them) a deceased person.  Interestingly, famous deceased people appear far more often in my dreams than famous living people.

Such dreams may support a belief in life after death, but I can imagine a skeptical objection. A skeptic might say something like this:

 "Your frequent dreams of life after death are just wish fulfillment produced by brain activity. You want to believe in life after death, so that is what you dream about." 

I will now list several reasons why such an explanation is not credible. 

(1) Wish-fulfillment dreams tend to be rare in the general public, and I had few wish-fulfillment type dreams prior to the time I started to record my dreams. 

A rather frustrating feature of dreams for the average person is how infrequently a person will have a wish fulfillment dream. The average male would very much like to have a dream in which he has sex with a movie star or hits the home run that wins a World Series game, or buys a lottery ticket that makes him a millionaire.  Dreams like that rarely occur to the average person.  It is very much more common for dreams to involve some danger, or a person being in an uncomfortable situation.  That's why there exists a word in English language referring to bad dreams ("nightmare"), but why there does not exist in the English language a word referring to good dreams in which a wish is fulfilled. 

Before I started logging my dreams about a year ago, I would almost never get dreams that seemed like wish-fulfillment dreams.  Before I started logging my dreams, the only recurring dreams I ever had were uncomfortable dreams in which I found myself either working at the lowest-paying job I ever long worked at or at a company I formerly worked at that was pretty much the last company I would ever want to return to. Such dreams were the opposite of wish-fulfillment dreams. 

(2) Under materialist assumptions, there is no reason why anyone would have frequently repeating wish fulfillment dreams involving life after death.

If we assume the type of things a materialist skeptic would assume, there is no reason at all why a person would tend to have repeated wish-fulfillment dreams, particularly those involving life after death. Having such dreams would serve no evolutionary purpose and no survival-of-the-fittest purpose. The same objection can be made to those who claim that near-death experiences or reports of apparitions of the dead are caused by some built-in brain "comfort" mechanism. Such "comfort" mechanisms would have no purpose for reasons pertaining to survival of the fittest. 

In fact, under Darwinist assumptions we would expect that an increase in fear of death would tend to produce more survival. A person more afraid of being killed by predators would be more likely to protect himself against predators. So under the assumptions favored by materialist skeptics, we simply cannot account for why a person would keep having dreams suggesting life after death. A person having abundant dreams about life after death would tend to be a little less likely to avoid danger, so there would be a slightly negative effect in regard to "survival of the fittest." 

(3) My dreams about life after death are too often cleverly and elaborately symbolic to be credibly explained as the result of random brain processes. 

It is not correct to describe my dreams about life after death as a recurring dream.  Such dreams are better described as a set of dreams that are each unique but seem to share an underlying theme. Many dozens of the dreams seem to involve clever and elaborate symbolism. Very often there will seem to be two or three symbolic elements in the same dream. Below are some examples:

• I had a dream in which a moth was trapped in my bathroom, and I opened up the bathroom window and turned off the light, so that the moth could be attracted to the moonlight or light from outside, and leave my bathroom.  The moth trapped in the bathroom may symbolize the soul trapped in a body. The turning off of the light may symbolize death. The idea of the moth leaving the bathroom and heading towards the greater light outdoors may symbolize the soul leaving the body and heading toward some greater light like that in some heavenly realm often described as a place of dazzling light. 
• I dreamed that as I looked from a high balcony, I looked down and saw a big table in  which about 24 people were seated. There was a single empty chair which  I recognized as where I would have sat. The empty chair may symbolize  death, and the high balcony a position in some afterlife realm. 
• I dreamed that two women came into my apartment, and some paranormal things started to happen. At least once the lights turned off and then on;  the face on a helium balloon changed its expression; and I found a little rag doll where no one would have put it: on top of a table lamp, near its glowing light bulb.  The turning off and turning on of the light is something I have got repeatedly in my dreams (and, most mysteriously, in real life when no human action was involved). The turning off may symbolize physical death, and the turning on may symbolize life after death. The rise of the rag doll to the top of the lamp may symbolize the ascent of the soul to heaven (people having near-death experiences often report rising up towards some heavenly light). 
• I had a dream I was in the lobby of a tall building, in front of its elevators. I was dressed in a business suit, but wearing no shoes.  My attire in this dream may symbolize death, because people who have open-coffin funerals often have fancy clothes on their top half, but no shoes (their bottom half being unseen by funeral attendees).  The elevators in front of me may symbolize an ascent to some higher plane of existence after death.  

Hundreds of similar examples are found in my very long post here. I have had very many dreams such as this in the past two years,  dreams that seem to make a very clever use of symbolic elements to refer to life after death, by employing more than one symbolic element in a single dream. Clever symbolism seems more the rule rather than the exception in such dreams. Each of the dreams has been different, although some elements repeat. Looking at the entire set of 270+ dreams I have had seeming to refer to life after death, all I can say is that I wish I was clever enough to have thought of all of these dreams myself. Doubting that my sleeping subconscious is some Einstein of semiotic creativity, I suspect they come from some power with creative ability and cleverness beyond my own.  

It is claimed that  in the dream state a person may be more prone to ESP.  Maybe there is some master of literary symbolism elsewhere on our planet who is sending such dreams to my mind. Or perhaps such dreams come from some spiritual reality beyond this earthly realm. 

Another reason for thinking that my dreams are not at all mere random content is the fact that known deceased people have appeared in my dreams far more often than known living people (not counting dreams of my daughters and wife). Our culture is celebrity-saturated. Who do we read about as we swipe our smartphones and tablets? Almost entirely living people. But, very oddly, in my dreams during the past two years the deceased seem to have appeared far more often than the living. Besides about 80 dreams about my father and about 80 dreams about my mother, I have had hundreds of dreams about a vast variety of deceased figures. Living people (outside of my family) show up much less commonly. This is not at all what we would expect from random brain activity. My dreams cannot be explained as something actively willed during a dream, because I virtually never have lucid dreams (dreams in which you are aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming). 

The phenomenon of having extremely abundant dreams about life after death is one that psychologists have failed to study. In general,  scientists have done a rather poor job of researching the subject of dreams. There are some interesting studies that have involved questioning terminally ill people about what kind of dreams they had. Such studies have often suggested that dreams hinting at life after death may be more common among the terminally ill. But the proper way to study dreams is not merely to ask people what dreams they recall having, but to get people to keep dream journals over a lengthy period of time. In general people tend to remember their dreams for only a short time. So if you are serious about studying dream content, what you need to do is to get people to keep dream journals, in which people write down their dreams as soon as they wake up and recall the dreams.  Almost no scientific studies have involved systematic attempts to get people to keep dream journals, and to analyze the contents of such journals over a long period of time.  

But I was able to find one study that analyzed dream content by age, and found one result consistent with my own experience. The study is one entitled "Typical dreams across the life cycle." It reports a theme of "a person now dead as alive" as being the seventh most common dream, with the frequency of the dream sharply increasing with age, as shown in the graph below:

A 1935 study ("The Dream in Primitive Cultures") found that a theme of "death and spirits of the dead" was the most common theme of people in the Solomon Islands. 

The type of analysis that typically occurs in scientific studies of dreams is a very superficial analysis. What typically goes on is a very shallow kind of keyword analysis. So, for example, a scientist may quantify how many dreams referred to an animal, how many dreams referred to a vehicle, how many dreams referred to a weapon, and so forth. While such analysis can conveniently be done through computer programming, such analysis is almost worthless for gleaming the content of dreams that may be symbolic and representational. A much better technique would be a technique of thematic analysis or semiotic analysis that requires a person to read a description of a dream and try to categorize a theme or idea that the dream represents. Instead of having computer programs that scan for keyword repetitions, you give dream accounts to humans who read the accounts, and then categorize each dream into one of a hundred categories, based on the assumption that a dream may symbolize or represent some particular idea or theme. 

I can give an example of how human semantic analysis is required for dreams that may have a symbolic content. Suppose someone has a dream in which he crosses a river and then walks up a path leading to the shining luminous top of a mountain:

Artwork by Stable Diffusion AI (link).

Now, a human familiar with the symbolism of life after death would recognize that the dream has three elements suggesting life after death: (1) the ascent to a mountain top; (2) the luminous elevated state at the top; (3) the crossing leading to the other side of the river (suggesting the motif of an Other Side or an afterlife).  But a computerized keyword searcher will merely record keyword matches for "river," "mountain," and "light," which will fail to provide any insight. 

Scientists could study dreams far more deeply, using better techniques such as encouraging the keeping of long-term dream journals, and the semantic or semiotic analysis of dreams requiring human analysis rather than mere computerized keyword matching. With adequate study and better techniques, scientists might discover something profoundly important: that humans receive very strong hints of an afterlife through their dreams. 

If you research the acronym ELDV (standing for end-of-life dreams and visions), you will read some papers and articles that sometimes suggest that the phenomenon of dreams suggestive of life after death is one that may occur in a person's last weeks or months. My own experience suggests that dreams suggestive of life after death can occur very strongly and heavily for years before someone's death. I've been having such dreams throughout the past two years, and expect they will continue for additional years.  Researchers should attempt to gauge the prevalance of such dreams not just in the last few weeks or months or someone's life, but also in the last five or ten years of someone's life. 

I can give the following advice for anyone keeping a dream journal:

(1) Keep a notebook next to your bed. 

(2) When you wake up and remember a dream, immediately use a pen or pencil to write down what you remember about the dream. Don't turn on the light to do this, which may make it harder to fall back to sleep. 

(3) Record any dream, regardless of whether it seems meaningful or not. It often happens that a dream will seem to have symbolism that you will only recognize upon pondering the dream. So don't try to figure out whether a dream is meaningful or not before writing it down. Just write down as quickly as possible whatever you remember about the dream. After you have risen, you can reflect on whether a dream seemed to symbolize anything.