It Wasn't a Dream: When Our Animals Visit From the Other Side
If you've lost an animal companion, you may already know the moment I'm talking about. You wake up in the middle of the night, or just as morning light starts to come in, and you know, not think, not hope, but know that your animal was just with you.
This is different from an ordinary dream, and once you've experienced it, you'll never confuse the two again. I call these visitations, and they have their own distinct qualities.
In an ordinary dream, things shift and blur. People and places morph into other people and places. Nothing holds still. A visitation feels nothing like that. It's crisp. It's grounded. There's a clarity to it that dreaming simply doesn't have.
In a visitation, your animal's spirit and yours meet in an in-between place, not quite here, not quite there. And in that place, something remarkable happens: you can feel them. The weight of them settling against you. The warmth of fur under your hand. A nose pressed into your palm. This is real, felt, physical connection, not a symbolic dream-image of it.
You can also talk with each other in a visitation. Not always in words. Sometimes it's more like a direct knowing that passes between you. But the communication is clear and unmistakable, not the fragmented, symbolic language of regular dreams.
And then there's the waking moment itself. You open your eyes, and instead of that dream feeling fading and going hazy the way dreams do, this stays. It stays real. You carry it with you into the day, and no amount of "it was probably just a dream" from your rational mind can talk you out of what you felt.
If this has happened to you, please trust it. Your animal found a way to reach you, and that in-between place made it possible. It's one of the most beautiful gifts our animals give us after they cross over, proof that the bond never actually ends, it just changes shape.
Listen2Animals.com
Debbie Johnstone
