I Had a Dream That I Died

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(Trigger Warning)

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Last night I had one of the strangest, heaviest dreams I’ve ever had. The kind that doesn’t feel like a nightmare, but also doesn’t just fade away when you wake up. In this dream, I died. Literally died. But I was still… me. Sentient. Aware. Conscious enough to know exactly what had happened, without ever seeing my body.

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What I did see was the mattress I supposedly died on. And that’s the part that stuck with me the most — not the death, not the floating awareness, but the mattress itself. It wasn’t clean. It had stains, signs of time passing, like my absence had settled into the fabric. Like decomposition had left a mark even though I couldn’t see myself.

It was such a weirdly specific detail: not the drama of death, but the slow, quiet aftermath of it.

And somehow, in that dream-logic way, I ended up with a friend who brought me back to life with something witchy and unexplainable. And honestly, that part didn’t even hit me as hard as the moment of seeing that mattress. Knowing I had been dead long enough for visual evidence to exist. Knowing I’d missed time. Knowing something about me decayed before I even realized it.

I keep thinking about that — the symbolic death of a version of myself, the idea of being aware but unable to intervene, the weird limbo of existing without a body. It wasn’t scary, but it was unsettling in that way dreams can be when they’re trying to tell you something without spelling it out.

Dream-death is supposed to symbolize change, endings, transitions, rebirth. But dreaming it with that level of detail — the stains, the time passing, the absence — it felt more like my subconscious doing a full autopsy on an old version of me. Showing me that something has been gone for a while, even if I’ve been clinging to it. Showing me that some part of my life, my identity, my habits, whatever it is — has already decomposed. I just hadn’t acknowledged it.

There’s something strange about seeing your own “death” from the outside. It makes you confront the parts of yourself that don’t fit anymore. The mindsets you’ve outgrown. The versions of you that have expired without you noticing.

And the revival part — the coming back to life — almost felt secondary. Like the dream wasn’t about being saved or reborn, but about actually seeing that something in me had ended. Not in a dramatic way, not in a traumatic way, but in a quiet, inevitable, “this has run its course” way.

I woke up weirdly calm, but thoughtful. A little unsettled. A little curious.Mostly aware that something in my subconscious is shifting, shedding, rearranging.

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It’s not every day you dream of your own symbolic death. It’s even rarer when the dream leaves you feeling like maybe that ending wasn’t a bad thing — just something you finally needed to see.

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Until next time — sweet dreams, or at least interesting ones.

xoxo, MJ