Last night I had a dream that my grandmother came back to life.
Not like, that she was alive and trucking along like nothing had happened. No, I dreamed that she actually came back from the dead.
I specifically remember thinking in the dream, “wait, we CREMATED you. How is this even a thing?” But I never asked it out loud in the dream because it seemed kind of rude, and because honestly, I was pretty happy to have her back and didn’t want to jinx it.
There was a bunch of other weird stuff going on in the dream as well:
- my dad and my uncle were working on fixing up a little house for Surprise Resurrected Nana to live in,
- Surprise Resurrected Nana was having some health issues (understandably, considering) and so my aunts and my mom and I were taking turns running her back and forth to the doctor,
- and one of my cousins was going around town trying to buy back a bunch of Surprise Resurrected Nana’s stuff that had been sold off in a yard sale after her passing.
Also, I became convinced that I had had a premonition about her coming back from the dead because, one night while I was sitting at the kitchen table painting, I could smell her on the breeze. That actually happened in real life a few nights ago, oddly – I was sitting there painting and the breeze that wafted in through the open window smelled so intensely like Nana’s old house (the one she lived in when I was a little kid, not the house she spent the rest of her life in after my grandfather died), that I had this combination of powerful nostalgia and skin-crawling creepiness. I absolutely believe in ghosts and I’m pretty sure that she was visiting me for whatever reason the other night.
So…maybe my brain was trying to work through my feelings about that strange, creepy visit by putting it in dream form. Maybe the dream was brought on by the fact that yesterday was my mom’s birthday and I was thinking a lot about people I love getting older and how that’s simultaneously the most normal and also the most terrifying thing about life. Maybe it was the simple byproduct of random neural impulses zapping through the soup of fucked-up neurotransmitters sloshing around in my skull.
Or maybe it was because I ate a gigantic hot fudge sundae a couple hours before bed.
Who can really say.
“I’m pouting because all I got was one half-assed lick of whipped cream. These monsters are so cruel to me. Won’t somebody save me?” – Keppo, Semi-Professional Pouter and All Around Neglected Canine
How Bad Can It Go? 
I had one of those “Grandma came back to life dreams” before. I remember thinking in the dream “She’s going to be soooooo pissed when she finds out we sold her house and car….”
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Mine wasn’t a dream, I don’t think. We had our 12 year old Akita put to sleep (he’d let us know it was time) and this happened not long after. I felt the side of the mattress jiggle early one morning. Chaos used to put his head on the edge of the mattress and wiggle his head from side to side until you got up. Anyway, I felt that. It was so real that I opened my eyes and got out of bed. I heard toenails clicking on the laminate floor outside the bedroom door, and I followed the sound, calling his name. It wasn’t until I’d actually walked out of the bedroom that I remembered he was gone. But it didn’t freak me out. It made me feel like he came back to let me know that we had made the right decision and that he was okay.
So Grandma may have been checking in to make sure that you’re doing okay.
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I experienced similar things when we had to put our Junior down back in December. For the first like three or four nights after we lost him, I could absolutely feel him in his spot on the bed at night. I could also definitely hear him snuffling and snorting a couple times, and I saw him out of the corner of my eye a few times when I was working in the kitchen (he was always cruising underfoot for snacks when I was cooking, so I got really good at seeing him even when I wasn’t looking for / at him, if you see what I mean. He was little – 10lbs – so it was super easy for him to dart around my feet). Like you said, it didn’t freak me out at all…I was more glad to catch those little glimpses of him. Same with Nana visiting. There have been other times in the last year and a half or so that she’s been gone when I’ve felt her near, and it always makes me smile.
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