Losing someone you care about in a dream can be extremely upsetting. It’s the sort of dream that can have you waking up in tears, full of relief to know that you were just sleeping and none of the pain you suffered in your dreams is real. Some people think that this dream can be a premonition that someone in the real world is going to pass away, but that is rarely the case. If you take this dream too literally, it can fill you with a lot of unnecessary fear. Death in dreams usually is symbolic of transformation. There might be some big changes going on in your waking life or some aspects of yourself that are being transformed.
When one hears the phrase "near death experience" most people think of an awesome spiritual experience in which one sees light or their god or ancestors. That's an experience very few people have. But almost everyone will have to deal with death sometime, their own or their loved ones'. The common way to be near death is to know a loved one is dying and to be trying to handle their affairs and set everything up for them to succeed at being a newly dead person. One succeeds at being a dead person by having one's cremation or burial, funeral and / or wake set up in advance. One of the major goals of a funeral is to provide the rites that help a dead person cross. If the dying person and the person doing the arrangements and the person handling the funeral are all the same religion it makes things a lot easier, but for many pagans and heathens this will not be the case.
There are things the dying person can do in advance, years in advance, to prepare for death. Among those things is to speak to one's patron deity or ancestors about where one is going and how to get there. There are also things one can do for another before the person actually dies. Most of those things will be mundane things in the mundane world, but one can also send blessings, even to someone one can no longer visit in person.
This is a closely packed and idea heavy blog post so please read slowly, and chew slowly so you can digest it. This is also part one of a two-part blog that tries to move beyond the binary distinction of life and death.
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