You dreamt of a relative who died. What can you do?

The most important thing first: you do not need to do anything because of a dream.

And if you do want to, this page covers what you can do. Both are completely normal. Neither one is the more “caring” choice.

How common are these dreams?

We will start with a number, because this kind of dream can make you feel you are the only one.

One survey asked bereaved hospice caregivers, 278 people in all. Of them, 58% reported dreaming of the person who had died, some often and some rarely.

The survey describes four common kinds of content:

• happy memories from before
• seeing the person free of illness
• memories of their illness or the time around their death
• the person seeming at peace on the other side

Most of the dreams described were pleasant, or pleasant and painful at once. Purely distressing ones were the minority.

Source: Wright, S. T., Kerr, C. W., Doroszczuk, N. M., Kuszczak, S. M., Hang, P. C., & Luczkiewicz, D. L. “The impact of dreams of the deceased on bereavement: a survey of hospice caregivers.” American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care, 2014, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 132–138. DOI 10.1177/1049909113479201.

We should be clear about what that number covers. It comes from one survey published in an English-language journal in 2014, of bereaved hospice caregivers. It is not a Chinese sample, not a census, not a figure for Hong Kong, and certainly not a figure for “everyone in the world”. We could not find comparable figures from a Chinese sample.

So the number tells us only one thing, but it is worth knowing: among bereaved people, this kind of dream is not rare.

A shift in the research, in passing

For a long time, mainstream grief counselling talked about “moving on” and “letting go”. In 1996, an academic collection called Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (edited by Klass, Silverman and Nickman, Taylor & Francis) put forward another view: keeping an ongoing bond with the person who died does not necessarily mean failing to let go. It can be a normal part of grief.

Thirty years of research, and the conclusion is something families had been doing all along. We find that shift rather funny, and rather touching.

To read further: search Google Scholar for the grief-dream papers by Joshua Black and Kathryn Belicki, for example “Who Dreams of the Deceased?” (Dreaming, 2019).

Why will this page not interpret your dream?

You may already have searched “dreaming of a relative who died” and found pages of dream dictionaries: if they were smiling it means this, if they were crying it means that.

We will not do that, for two reasons.

First, we cannot verify it. No source we could find supports a mapping of the kind “dreaming of A means B”.

Second, the more practical reason. Interpretations like these often end with “so you need to do something”. And the next sentence, quite naturally, is “and we happen to sell it”.

We have to watch for that ourselves, because we are the ones selling offering packets. So it is safer to draw a clear line: we will not use your dream as a reason to ask you to order anything.

What does 託夢, a “dream visit”, actually mean?

Tradition does have a word for this: 託夢, roughly “entrusting a message through a dream”.

The Chinese Wikipedia entry 〈託夢〉 opens like this (consulted 5 September 2026): in Daoism and folk religion, if gods or spirits wish to convey something, they may appear in a person’s dream to give instructions, or show scenes that foretell good or ill fortune (our translation).

But we should be honest about one thing: that entry is about gods and spirits. It does not specifically discuss dreaming of your own relative who has died. Getting from “I dreamt of Grandpa” straight to “Grandpa sent me a message in a dream” is a step popular belief added on its own.

Does that step exist? Yes, and plenty of people put it that way. Is there a source we can check for it? We could not find one.

So this is where this page stands: some people feel the dream means something, and some feel it is simply missing someone. Neither view is surprising, and we will not choose for you.

If someone uses your dream to tell you something is wrong in your family, that you must hold a ritual straight away, or that you must buy something straight away, walking away is a reasonable response.

What can you do, if you want to do something?

First, the direction. The four things below are not remedies, and they are in no particular order. They are ways of remembering: giving something you already want to do a shape you can actually manage.

One: write the dream down while you still remember it.
Dreams fade, usually within a morning. Writing it down is not about decoding it. It is about keeping it. What you are really keeping is “that night, I saw them again”. A few lines typed into your phone is enough.

Two: tell your family about it.
“I dreamt of Grandma last night.” Once you say it, it often brings back someone else’s memory: an aunt starts talking about the soups Grandma used to make. Only family can do that, and no service can stand in for it.
If you are abroad, check what time it is in Hong Kong before you call. The call is not urgent, but it is worth making.

Three: cook the dish they loved.
No need to wait for a festival or the anniversary. If they loved steamed fish, steam a fish this Sunday. Say a few words about them as you eat, and that is already an act of remembrance.

Four: make a small offering.
If your family has always done this: light a stick of incense, set out a cup of tea, say a few words. No ancestral tablet, living in an apartment, cannot even burn incense: there is still a version you can do, and this article covers the simplest one.

As for burning an offering packet, it is one way of doing the fourth, and it is not what this page is recommending. If you do the first three, that is already complete.

There is a fifth option, and it is just as normal as the other four: do nothing at all.

A dream is not a bill.

What if the dream left you unsettled?

Not every dream is warm. Some are painful, and some are warm and painful together. In the survey above, “pleasant” and “pleasant and painful at once” made up most of them between them.

If yours was the painful kind, we will not tell you that “burning something will stop the dreams”. Nobody can honestly say that.

What we will say is two very ordinary things.

Tell someone you trust about it. Saying it out loud is itself something. You do not need to wait until you can tell it “properly”.

If it keeps affecting your sleep or your daily life, seeing a local grief counsellor or a doctor is a perfectly normal choice. That has nothing to do with whether you believe in offerings.

It goes by different names in different places, commonly grief counselling or bereavement support. Good places to start looking are your local hospital, community centres, university counselling services and Chinese community organisations. We will not list names here, because we cannot check what exists in your city.

What do we not know?

How many people go and make an offering, or burn a packet, after a dream? We have no figures.

The shop has never counted this, and we could not find a reliable survey. That is why, from top to bottom, this page never says “many people who dream of the dead go on to…”. We cannot support that sentence.