What Are Your Ancestors Trying To Tell You?
53 percent of Americans report connections with their ancestors who have departed, most of them through their dreams.
Photo©Serhii Yevdokymov/123rf
We are the dreams of our ancestors. We carry their lives within our DNA and within our energy bodies. We carry both the shredded remnants of past wounds and the shining grain of sand that created the pearl. If we can inherit trauma, we can inherit strength and wisdom as well. Your ancestors can pass on their gifts, their blessings, and their wisdom through your dreams, and their pain, suffering, and trauma can get transmitted through your nightmares. Sometimes the pain of the past is more than can be transmuted in one lifetime. Sometimes the pearl and the pain have different origins.
Deep in your history, your ancestors — your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, as far back as you can imagine and then some — had a dream, an image, a vision of what they hoped for the lives of their descendants. You are that dream, the time-traveled embodiment of their hopes and visions. You and your ancestors have been through wounding and trauma, as well as freedom and redemption. As the psychologist Diana Fosha tells us, we are wired for healing. So, the trajectory is ultimately that of attaching and connecting, moving forward, repairing, and blessing.
Getting Your Attention First
How do your ancestors get your attention: through shouts or through whispers? By way of your dreams or nightmares, or in your waking life? Both Buddhist philosophy and a children’s nursery rhyme tell us that “life is but a dream.” For some dreams, we are asleep, and for others we are awake: Waking dreams include noticing signs we may have missed before, including uncanny coincidences, déjà vu, and prescient experiences of knowing something before it happens.
Your ancestors may come to you unasked, or you may intentionally call or invoke them. When you do hear from your ancestors, they may whisper so softly that you need to stop, tune in, and pay attention to hear them, or they may shout so loudly — especially if they are showing up in your nightmares —that your natural tendency is to intentionally avoid their messages, almost like putting your fingers in your ears and saying, “la, la, la” so as not to hear. These messages can be intense; I don’t blame you. But your ancestors’ messages won’t go away until you stop and listen so that you can respond to their request.
According to a 2023 Pew Research study, 53 percent of Americans report connections with their ancestors who have departed, most of them through their dreams. In addition to dream visits and connections, some reported hearing their ancestor’s voice inside their head while awake. Others experienced a “felt sense” in their bodies. These connections are sometimes simply a felt presence of the ancestor in the room or vicinity. Sometimes our ancestors show up as themselves in our dreams, and sometimes they are symbolized, hidden, or disguised as metaphor. In that case, we must then decode their messages and true identities.
The Six Ancestral Calls
I have identified six types of messages that people tend to receive from their ancestors.
- “I am still here, and you are not alone.”
- “Take these gifts, blessings, or apologies.”
- “Let me help, heal, or warn you.”
- “Please, please help and heal me; I am still suffering.”
- “Watch out: This old grudge has not yet been resolved.”
- “Carry on my name and gifts to your children and your children’s children. Remember.”
Remember that messages may come through in multiple layers of consciousness including while asleep, while in reverie states, or out-of-the blue in waking consciousness. Each type of call, be it a shout or a whisper, may require a different kind of response. Some of these calls ask that we listen and respond, others ask us to do something, and still others make demands.
We move in and through endless spirals of time and place, not only in a straight line from past to future, which is easier for us to picture, but also in spirals that are contained within us. When the veil between worlds is thinner — either because of grief or loss, or because you are straddling the threshold of waking and sleeping — you can more easily access your departed loved ones and any resources you may need to heal and finish their journeys.
A Dream Or A Visit?
When dreaming of the departed, many people speak of it as a visit rather than a dream. Visits are reported particularly often in the first weeks after someone dies. What is the difference between a dream and a visit? In a dream, what you see is a character who is part of your dream story. It may be that the dream character is clearly your mother, but she is acting within the dream along with known or unknown dream people. Or there may be a character in the dream who does not look like your dad, but somehow you know it is him.
By contrast, in a visit, you will likely have a powerful and visceral felt sense of your loved one’s presence. You can feel the essence of your beloved right there with you, as if they were still alive. A visit is usually more vivid, more intense, more colorful, and more real. You may hear their voice or feel the touch of their hands as concrete occurrences. Often, there is a numinosity in either the visit or the person, a sense of light, glowing, shining, shimmering, or larger-than-life brightness.
Sometimes a visit comes in other bodies. A bright red cardinal came and tapped at my mom’s bedroom window every day for a week after my stepdad Bud died. This had never happened before, and it’s never happened since. My mom was convinced that it was her beloved husband. We gladly joined her in this, and whenever a cardinal visits my house, we say, “Hi Bud.” It always makes me smile. In many cultures and in folklore, birds are said to carry the spirit of the departed to the living.
Sometimes visitations occur spontaneously; other times, they only come by invitation. My hairdresser reports frequent visits from her departed mom and sister. She is, like me, a thin-boundaried person, who easily crosses thresholds. One day, her husband (who works with her in the salon) overheard us talking and piped in, “Mine never visit.” I suggested to him that they might just be waiting for an invitation, if he was interested in a visit. He replied that it didn’t really matter that much to him. His ambivalence and lack of interest in having them show up was probably part of the reason he hadn’t experienced this. We all have different relationships with the dreaming world as well as with relatives.
Dreamer and author Mike Marble shares, “I ask if they have requested a dream with the person they desire to connect with. They often seem surprised by this inquiry. Just as someone waits for an invitation to dinner, some of us don’t assume an unannounced visit is warranted. Remembering our dreams and setting an intention to meet up with that person increases the likelihood of it occurring. It’s a two-way street so to speak.” I love the analogy of waiting for a dinner invitation, rather than just showing up at someone’s house. Seems that there might be a protocol that some ancestors prefer to follow!
Excerpt reprinted with permission of the author from Ancestral Dreaming ©Linda Yael Schiller, Llewellyn Publishing, 2025.
Linda Yael Schiller, MSW, LICSW, is an international speaker and author on dreamwork, trauma, and integrated embodied spiritually, an integrative mind/ body/spiritual psychotherapist and consultant with over forty years’ experience, and a long-term member of The International Association for the Study of Dreams. Linda has been a member of her own dream circle for over forty years. http://www.lindayaelschiller.com
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