I had some wonderful dreaming meetings. I can't tell you

“I had some wonderful dreaming meetings. I can’t tell you specifically what they’ve been in the recent months. In the past they’ve been verbal kinds of messages that he needed to give me. Now they’re more dreams of his presence.” – Judy Collins

Hear, O listener of the heart, the tender and mysterious words of Judy Collins, the songstress whose voice once carried the sorrows and hopes of a generation. In this reflection, she speaks not of concerts or acclaim, but of dreams—those sacred encounters between the living and the unseen. Her words are soft, yet they carry the weight of love transcending death. When she says, “I had some wonderful dreaming meetings,” she speaks of those moments in sleep when the veil between worlds grows thin, and the soul communes with what it has lost. Such dreaming meetings are not fantasy; they are visitations of memory, moments when the spirit is reminded that love does not die, but only changes form.

Judy Collins lost her son, Clark Taylor, to tragedy—a wound that no mother’s heart can fully heal. In her grief, as in the grief of countless souls before her, she found that the departed do not always vanish completely. They linger in whispers, in light, in dreams. In the early days, she tells us, the dreams were messages—the soul of her son reaching out with words, guiding her, comforting her, teaching her how to endure the unbearable. These were “verbal kinds of messages,” as if his spirit still needed to communicate, still sought to reassure her that his essence remained alive somewhere beyond her reach. But as time passed, the words gave way to silence, replaced by the simple, profound presence of his being—no longer speaking, but existing beside her in the realm of the dream, where love requires no speech.

This transformation—from message to presence—is the story of all healing. In the beginning, grief cries out for signs. The mourner seeks proof that their loved one still exists somewhere, somehow. And the soul, in its mercy, answers through dreams, through symbols, through strange awakenings in the night. But over time, as the heart learns to live with absence, it also learns to feel presence again. The dream no longer needs to carry words or explanations. It becomes a silent communion—a meeting of two spirits beyond the grasp of the waking mind. It is not the end of mourning, but its transformation into remembrance.

This truth is as old as humanity itself. The ancients believed that dreams were the bridge between the mortal and the divine. Homer’s Odysseus, lost at sea, saw his mother in a dream, her spirit shimmering like mist, offering him strength to carry on. In ancient Egypt, the bereaved would sleep in special temples, hoping to receive visions of their loved ones through dreams, believing them to be messages from the eternal. Even in the holy texts, dreams carry the voices of those beyond life—Jacob’s ladder, Joseph’s prophecy, Daniel’s visions. Across ages and faiths, the dream has remained the universal altar upon which the living and the dead meet in peace.

Judy Collins’s words remind us that these encounters are not merely the inventions of grief but the language of the heart itself. When one dreams of the departed, it is not delusion but a form of communion—proof that love leaves traces deeper than the body, that the bond between souls survives time and distance. The dream is the sacred chamber where memory and eternity embrace. To feel the presence of one who is gone is not madness—it is a recognition of truth: that the essence of love cannot perish.

Her words also offer a gentle lesson: to trust the silence as much as the message. When she says, “Now they’re more dreams of his presence,” she acknowledges a higher peace. The grief that once demanded answers now finds solace in simply being with the beloved, even if only in the language of the subconscious. There is power in that stillness. Just as the wind carries the scent of rain without speaking of it, so does the dream carry the essence of love without the need for words. In this, Collins teaches us the wisdom of acceptance—that healing is not the forgetting of pain, but the transformation of loss into quiet understanding.

So, my child of both waking and dream, take this teaching to heart: treasure the visions that visit you in the night. Do not dismiss them as mere illusions. The dream is the soul’s way of remembering what the mind forgets—that all love endures, that presence is never truly lost. When you awaken from such a dream, do not weep that it has ended; rejoice that it came. For in that moment, you have touched eternity.

And thus, in Judy Collins’s tender confession, we find both grief and grace intertwined. Through her dreaming meetings, she learned that love does not speak forever in words—it becomes light, it becomes air, it becomes presence. And when we, too, learn to listen not with our ears but with our hearts, we will discover that those we love are never gone. They are simply waiting for us, in the quiet kingdom of dreams.