The Companion Animal

The animal as it was, frequently in better health or younger than at death. Reported with considerable sensory detail (weight, warmth, texture) more than most dream figures.

Ordinary. Sleeping, greeting, following, sitting. Rarely does anything significant, and the ordinariness is what dreamers describe as valuable.

Domestic and familiar. The home the animal lived in.

1. An ordinary dream, frequently mundane.
2. The animal present without explanation.
3. Ordinary interaction, often physical contact.
4. Waking with the feeling persisting.

Love, peace, and grief simultaneously. Dreamers frequently report the physical sensation of touch as the most vivid element.

Not well documented historically, largely because pet bereavement was not treated as significant until recently. That absence is about the record, not the experience.

Very widely reported wherever people live with animals.

Whether the dreamer knows the animal died varies and shapes the emotional tone considerably.

Physical contact is reported unusually often and unusually vividly, which distinguishes these dreams from most.

• Grief, and its under-acknowledgement.
• Continuing bonds.
• Physical memory, in the touch reports.
• Ordinariness, as the source of comfort.

Consistently reported as comforting. Many dreamers describe them as the point at which the loss became bearable.

The waking, and the loss arriving again. Also the awkwardness many people feel about grieving an animal this much, which is worth contradicting directly.

Continuing bonds applies to animal bereavement as it does to human bereavement. Continuity accounts for the frequency.

Little formal tradition, which is itself a comment on how animal grief has been treated.

The general grief-dream literature applies. Pet-specific research is limited.

• How did they look?
• Could you feel them?
• Did you know, in the dream, that they had died?
• How long ago?

Common, and the tone typically shifts over time in the same way human grief dreams do.