The dream traditions are unusually united on death: almost none of them read it literally. Artemidorus interpreted dream death most often as change, of household, occupation or condition, since the dead man leaves his former life entire, and the Greek handbook tradition read death and marriage as mirrored images of one another, each a departure from one state into another. The folk dictionaries kept the same instinct in the blunter rule that dreams go by contraries, reading a death toward long life or news of a birth.
Freud gave the image its most uncomfortable modern treatment. In The Interpretation of Dreams he examined the typical dream of a loved one's death and traced it, where it was accompanied by grief, to childhood death wishes long outgrown and repressed, a reading that belongs entirely to his theory and stands or falls with it. Jungian writers read dream death as the psyche's word for an ending already underway, something in the dreamer's life completing itself so that something else can begin.
Bereavement research adds the visitation dream, in which the recently dead appear alive, usually calm and often consoling. These are among the best documented of all dream experiences and are reported across cultures; the traditions differ on what they are, but not on how much they matter to the people who have them.