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Dreams of a father in South America
The loss and the dreams
The son was 21 and away on a skiing holiday with friends when it happened. There was no warning. He was told only after he came back from the holiday, never saw his father, and went to the funeral, a series of events that felt unreal.
For years the dreams followed the same shape: the father had been in South America and suddenly appeared again, and the son got a chance to talk to him. In some ways his father wasn't really dead.
The father and the aftermath
The father was very much a 1960s dad who wasn't supposed to deal with children. He went to work and studied in his study, wasn't sporty, and did nothing with his son, who never got to discuss anything meaningful with him.
The sudden death also left the son thinking he might die early too, and wondering whether his father had rotten genes. It pushed him to make more of his life.
Why do bereaved people dream of the dead?
Sigmund Freud described grief in his 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia as slow work: reality shows that the loved one is gone, yet attachment lingers and has to be withdrawn bit by bit. Surveys of bereaved adults report that dreams of the person who died are common, often showing them alive. Freud's term for the process was reality testing.
How does sudden death change grief?
In a 2014 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Katherine Keyes and colleagues analyzed World Mental Health surveys from many countries. The unexpected death of a loved one was the most commonly reported traumatic event. Prolonged grief disorder became an official diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR in 2022.
How much did fathers' time with children change?
A 2013 Pew Research Center analysis by Kim Parker and Wendy Wang found that fathers in the US spent about 2.5 hours a week on child care in 1965. By 2011 the figure had risen to about 7 hours. Fathers in the 1960s were typically expected to be breadwinners, with child care left to mothers.