Grief can possess a mourner’s dreams and invade waking compulsions
Evidence
Once back in my bedroom, I was afraid. Death was everywhere. Death was in the jacket in the hall, where the envelope containing my father’s possessions was, death was in the chair in the living room, where she had found him, death was on the stairs, where they had carried him, death was in the bathroom, where grandad had collapsed, his stomach covered with blood. … Once my consciousness had opened in this way, I was sure his body was in the wardrobe, and I checked, rummaged through all the dresses hanging there, checked the next, and the next, and having done that, I went back to bed and continued sleeping. In my dreams he was sometimes dead, sometimes alive, sometimes in the present, sometimes in the past. It was as if he had completely taken me over, as if he controlled everything inside me, and when at last I awoke, at around eight o’clock, my first thought was it had been a nocturnal visitation, the second that I had to see him again. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 2550
Categorization
- DEFINE: This gives a vivid phenomenology of the dead ‘taking over’ the mourner — the nocturnal visitation as a lived category, distinct from ordinary dream and reality.
- XREF: connects to: Pregnancy can shape a mother’s dreams toward flood and loss imagery — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1120; Grief recovery paradoxically makes the lost person more vivid — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 313; The presence of a deceased loved one can feel real during mourning. — Hamlin Garland Munseys, A Daughter of the Middle Border, 1059 (+2 more)
Related
- Grief can drain meaning from the surrounding world while leaving inner thought intact (similarity 0.82)
Broader Connections
- Grief recovery paradoxically makes the lost person more vivid
#expands(0.50) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 313 - The presence of a deceased loved one can feel real during mourning.
#expands(0.50) — Hamlin Garland Munseys, A Daughter of the Middle Border, 1059 - Grief encompasses a range of complex, untidy emotions.
#expands(0.45) — Lynch, Thomas, The undertaking-life studies from the…, 616