After death, our consciousness, as stated by a few religions, is lifted out of their original bodies, and taken into heaven. But instead of getting lifted into heaven, the consciousness is sometimes taken into a domain (as believed by Catholics) called “purgatory”. How does this link to lucid dreaming? Sometimes people who are grieving loved ones who have passed and happen to be involved with lucid dreaming, decide to speak to their dead relatives. I have read a few of these accounts where these specific deceased “beings” mentioned purgatory. What if the so-called “imaginative” dream-characters were real consciousnesses present to help you in the grieving process? Just a thought, because my dad somewhat recently passed and I am 16, and i think it would be kind of interesting. Any thoughts?
I don’t know if the person you encounter in your dream is just a reminiscence of your memory, or the actual one in some place (purgatory) that actually can really interact with.
But even if it’s only what you can remember of this person, your memory is so accurate and powerful in your dreams that you will actually be able to talk with that person as if it was really him.
A good way to find out would be just to ask this person where he is and stuff like that, you will get surprising answer usually.
This is of course a religious topic. How LUCID dreaming ties into this would be, in the case that you are actually communicating with spirits, that you are conscious during the experience. This gives you an opportunity to test whether or not you are really communication with the dead. If you can control the person it seems unlikely that they are something other than a mental image, because one would expect a spirit to control itself. Then again, one can imagine a dead person communicating by taking control of a dream character, the control of which could possibly be taken away by the dreamer or the dream itself, much like a video game figure can be controlled by whoever has the controller, or by the AI, perhaps switching, as happens when there are cutscenes or idle-animations.