Quite frequently dreams reveal that the departed are present because, quite simply, they never left. A California woman dreamed she entered her living room and found her departed boyfriend on the sofa watching, TV. Surprised, she asked what he was doing there. He responded, “I’m just watching TV”. He did not seem to be aware that he had died.

The departed may linger because they have unfinished business, or wish to act as guide and protector to the family, or are attached to people and places they loved in waking life, and this may be a perfectly happy situation for a year or two. But there comes a time when our departed need to move on, for their own growth, and so they do not become a psychic burden to the living. Because our society does a poor job in preparing people for the afterlife, many people who have passed on do not know they are dead, and hover in a limbo close to familiar people and places on this Earth.

We do not need to be especially psychic to notice that in a certain kind of bar, “dead” barflies outnumber the living ones. When the departed remain earthbound, the effects are unhealthy both for those who have died and those among the living to whom they are connected. When the dead are enmeshed with the living, the result is mutual confusion, loss of energy, and the transfer of addictions, obsessions and even physical ailments from the departed to the person whose energy field he or she is sharing.

When the dead are still around in a dense energy body, they can produce physical or ghostly phenomena. The dense energy body of a deceased person should not be confused with their surviving consciousness or enduring spirit. It needs to be contained and dispersed. This sometimes reqiires a “second burial”; I offer detailed guidance on how to conduct this ritual of containment band release in my Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. However much love we may have shared with a decease loved one, we do not want long-term entanglement of the energies of the dead and the living on this level.

Helping the departed may involve a loving dialogue, a simple ritual of honoring and farewell, and invoking spiritual helpers. As we become active dreamers, familiar with the geography of the afterlife, we may find we are called on to provide personal escort services and help to instruct some of our departed on their options on the other side, as explained in detail in my Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. William Butler Yeats noted quite accurately that “the living can assist the imaginations of the dead”.

Brown Lady ghost photograph by Captain Hubert C. Provand. Published in Countrylife magazine, 1936

Next: Why the dead come calling