mclaugh Thanks for sharing this question and your experience. I’m 43 and my wife died a little over 20 years ago. I dream about her regularly. We talk in the dreams. In the first few years after she passed away these dreams frightened me because I was and am an adamant atheist. Frankly, the dreams were so real that they scared the hell out of me. So much so, that I couldn’t talk to her in the dreams and would wake up suddenly when I made an effort to converse with her. Over the past 5 years I have learned to relax within the dream and not allow myself to panic at the sense of reality. The less I try to talk in my dream the better. Still, I often am left with overwhelming sadness when I wake up and realize it wasn’t real. The oddest thing that happens to me, even as recently as yesterday morning…It only happens when I don’t remember dream. Her voice—sounding like she is at the foot of my bed—startles me awake. She just calls out my name, “David.” Not loudly, but urgently. Not panicky, but purposeful, as if she were trying to get me to pay heed to something. Though I honestly have real trouble purposefully remembering the sound of her voice when I am awake, when I am started awake by ‘her voice,’ it is exactly as it was. I know it is all my own creation, but it sure seems real.