Regarding Family
Dream dictionaries argue that to dream of members of your extended family is not always portentous. To dream of a cousin, the experts sometimes say, indicates you might have disappointment and sadness. Even dreaming of a friendly correspondence with your cousin signifies that there might be a major falling out in the family. If a woman dreams of her aunt, supposedly, she will soon receive severe criticism of choices and actions she makes in life. However, dreams of death and sex involving family members may have very different connotations.
Remember to ask yourself important life questions before you go to sleep. When you recall your dreams the next morning, something in your nighttime visions should give you an answer to your dilemmas.
Death Dreams Involving Family Members
A death or near-death dream involving a family member or relative, like most death dreams, may point to a major upheaval in the dreamer's life. The dream acts as a conduit of information, as in the next example. This dream is called “Apparition”:
Aunt Pat, my mother's older sister, appears to me, hovering like a ghost in a corner of the bedroom. In the dream, the image is so clear I can see the lines in her face, the soft gray of her hair, the shape of her mouth. She's speaking to me, but I can't hear the words.
I suddenly associate this kind of apparition with stories I've heard about people who appear to loved ones at the time of their death. I try to scream, but can't, and bolt awake. For seconds it seems that the image of my aunt is actually in a corner of the bedroom, exactly where it was in the dream. Then I blink and the apparition fades. Or maybe it wasn't really there at all; maybe I imagined it. I still don't know.
The next day, I called my parents and asked if my aunt was okay. As far as they knew she was. I forgot about the dream until several days later, when my parents said they'd spoken to my aunt. She had fallen and cracked her hip over the same weekend I had the dream and was planning on moving in with her son.
Despite immediate evidence to the contrary, this dream indicated that the aunt would be or was already undergoing a major life change. Though in the dream she's a sort of ghost—which the dreamer then translated as her aunt being dead and coming to visit her—this isn't the case. Instead, the aunt was about to move in with her son. She was making a drastic life change. This is an example of a precognitive death dream. The dreamer dreamed about the aunt dying or appearing as a ghost; instead, the aunt was actually about to go through a life transition.
