Dreams My Mother Taught Me: Lessons in Lucid Dreaming from Beyond the Grave

Dreams My Mother Taught Me: Lessons in Lucid Dreaming from Beyond the Grave

Author: Melinda Powell

Illustrator: Eri Grifin

Photographs: Family

Foreword:

I become lucid and say, “I know I’m dreaming, Lord, if you want to, come for me.” As I do so, the dreamscape gives way to the Black Light, where a current of wind carries my soul very fast for a great distance. Repeating a sacred song helps me to keep focused.

With these words, author Melinda Powell launches the reader into realms of intense beauty, through spiritually powerful transcendent lucid dreams These transcendent experiences haven’t asked her to transcend her own life, however, but to deepen it. She writes of how this series of lucid dreams helped her reconcile with the past and to move forward in life.

In this collection of dreams, Melinda’s mother returns after her death to help Melinda on her own path. “It seems to me now that my mother’s mission in my lucid dreams was to help me re-establish trust in myself and in life…so that in waking life I could find that still center, a wellspring of love that is the soul’s nature and purpose”.

This is a book about love and forgiveness, and the power of extraordinary dreams to help us heal our most important relationships long after we have been separated by death. The narrative skillfully weaves back and forth between dream and memory, tugging at Melinda’s relationship with each parent and with her dream figures, using stories to illuminate their lives. All the while, her dreams hold her and challenge her, supporting her longing for reconciliation. They illuminate her life and call her into a loving embrace of the people who raised her.

Melinda’s dreams bring healing personal memories and the deeper understanding of her mother and father as fallible human beings, beyond their roles as her parents. Her dreams allow her to appreciate and learn from her mother’s life choices. And her trust in her dreams helps Melinda return to her father’s side, home in time to be with him in his final days.

This is compassion and self-compassion. This is emotional growth and a spiritual deepening of Christianity’s essence. It is beautiful and poetic and psychologically astute. She writes, “Much therapeutic work revolves around learning to regain a sense of trust in our own intuition and in life itself, a trust that may have been violated, whether intentionally or not, by those we originally viewed with childlike faith, whether our parents, caregivers, or the wider world.” If this is so, and I have every reason to believe it is so, then Melinda’s dreams have given her a very rich life indeed. Her dreams have enriched my life as well, and I believe they will invite every reader into a new relationship with their own dreams, with their own possibilities.

Jeanne Van Bronkhurst, MA, MSW, (Canada) Former hospice social worker and author of Dreams at the Threshold: Guidance, Comfort and Healing at the End of Life (2015), and Premonitions in Daily life (2013).

Note to the Reader:

On my thirty-eighth birthday, my mother, Margaret, died, crossing over with her now adult children at her bedside. Even now, years on, whenever I see mothers and daughters conversing intimately, my heart quietly grieves. Whoever first said, "We're born alone, and we die alone" misses the point - the woman who bore you knows that she was with you on the day you were born!

After my mother's death, I felt both bereft and fortunate to have been with her in the months before she died of cancer. Her death felt doubly hard because I had lived abroad for many years. When I left the United States for Europe at twenty-five, she cried, "You will never come back!" Her words proved prophetic, for although I returned home often for visits, I settled in England.

If you have loved and lost your mother, you will have a sense of grief personal to you, one that resurfaces when you suddenly have the urge to talk with her or give her a hug.

Like me, you may wish you had got on better with your mother and had known her more as a person in her own right. It can be all the harder to accept the loss if she has left without saying "I love you", or without your having the chance to say the same. There may not have been time to ask for mutual forgiveness and understanding, leaving you both with many unanswered "Whys?".

Whether or not your mother has passed to the "other side", I present you, the reader, with a hope - that love continues beyond the grave. Even when the human relationship has been fraught, the departed soul, free from the adversities of life, will so often seek to love and make amends.

I share here the story of how my relationship with my mother deepened after her death as she initiated me into lucid dreaming.

Some readers might say my visions of my mother are nothing more than a projection of my dreaming mind. Others might argue that from beyond the veil she truly appeared. But I sense both are true.

Either way, I hope that my own experience will speak to you in a personal way and that my sharing these dreams my mother taught me may reassure you that love never dies.

Review:

Dreams My Mother Taught Me: Lessons in Lucid Dreaming from Beyond the Grave is a beautifully moving memoir by Melinda Powell, therapist, dream guide, author, and lucid dream specialist, that tells the story of a special connection between herself and her mother in Spirit.

Through her own lucid dreams Melinda is given a unique perspective and understanding of her mother's life, as well as that of her own, as they visit with each other across the veil. She finds answers to her questions about their lives and their relationship through dream interpretations that lead to spiritual resolutions within herself. Melinda shares her journey of self-discovery as she reflects upon deeper meanings behind her lucid dream visits with her mother.

This book is a tribute to the everlasting mother-daughter bond that endures across time and beyond earthbound limits. It has deeply touched my soul and opened my awareness of my own journey as a grieving daughter and mother. I feel sure that it will have a similar impact on everyone who reads it.

Camille Dan, author of Aaron's Energy: An Unexpected Journey Through Grief and the Afterlife with My Brilliant Son and Gathering at the Doorway: An Anthology of Signs, Visits, and Messages from the Afterlife, founder of 'The Book Club Across the Veil'

Contents:

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Jeanne Van Bronkhurst, MA, MSW
Note to the Reader
Prologue: The End is in the Beginning

Part One;Lessons in Surrender

Cutting the Cord
My Mother's Gifts
The Dark Womb of Creation
Back Home Again
Mirroring Soul
The Way to Blue

Part Two; Lessons in Light

The Holy of Holies
Trust in Light and Love
The Body of Light
Celestial Cities
Gifts of the Spirit

Part Three; Lessons in Grace

One More
New Light
Enveloped in Love
Where Heaven and Earth Touch
Coming Home

Part Four; Lessons in Life & Beyond

The Eternal Well of Living Light
The Refining Fire of Spirit
Living Waters
The Healing Power of Lucidity
Wearing Soul on the Outside

List of Dreams
Treasured Family Memories
Notes

About the Author:

Melinda Powell co-founded the Dream Research Institute (DRI), London, at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education to promote research into dreams and wellbeing. Melinda has served as past vice-president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and as director of the DRI and of Help Counselling Centre.

Formerly a psychotherapist, she now writes and teaches about dreams and dream lucidity. She is the author of The Hidden Lives of Dreams' (Bonnier Books UK, 2019), Lucid Surrender: The Alchemy of the Soul in Lucid Dreaming (Archive Publishing, 2021) and Dreams My Mother Taught Me: Lessons in Lucid Dreaming from Beyond the Grave (Archive Publishing, 2025).