Using Poetry to Process a Documented Visitation Dream with my Deceased Beloved

*Originally published on January 31, 2019. Reposted on May 25, 2026 with new research material and revisions.

Wilhelmina Longing for Her German Soldier Lover | from Blind Love | © 2017 Lavavoth Stuart

Introduction: Documenting Dream Experiences Leads to Poetry

Since September 2018, I've been consistently documenting my dreams. Although I'd recorded dreams on and off throughout my life, returning to graduate school intensified my interest in preserving nocturnal experiences. Initially, I documented these experiences by hand in journals, but over time, as I've gotten older, I noticed that recollections of dreams, spiritual visitations, and OBEs had become increasingly ephemeral and difficult to recall. Sitting upright or turning on a light was often enough to dissolve the experience.

Now, upon waking, I reach for my phone while remaining in the same bodily position in which the dream occurred and speak directly into the microphone, groggy and stumbling through half-formed sentences while speech-recognition software attempts to decipher my four-in-the-morning mumblings. The technological mediation itself has become part of the ritual, creating an intersection between my lapsing memory, the dreams, embodiment, and digital preservation.

Over time, some of the documentation of these experiences (e.g., nocturnal encounters/dreams/visitations) including this one, gradually evolved into a form of poetic inquiry, allowing dream material, symbolism, grief, and spiritual experience to merge into a single reflective and poetic practice.

Nocturnal Visitations from Hans

I don't need to dream to encounter Hans's paranormal interactions. Since officially entering my life in 2010, he's remained an ongoing supernatural presence, making me aware of him through various forms of activity. Some friends and family members have interpreted these encounters as demonic because of the intensity and persistence of the phenomena. One relative once warned me that “only demons behave this brazenly,” reflecting a fear-based theological framework that leaves little room for alternative interpretations of spirit communication. Truthfully, I was frightened at first as well.

Sometimes his words and speech get swallowed up by the amnesic consequence of sleep.

Having spent much of my earlier life as a nonbeliever with little sense of spiritual practice, the idea of an active spirit occupying my domestic space did not sit well with me. During the earliest manifestations in 2010, I even slept at a neighbor’s house for several nights. Ironically, it was there that Hans first began “pulling” me out of my body during sleep states in order to communicate with me.

Although I didn't understand it at the time, my first astral visitation with Hans actually occurred shortly after his death in 1993. What I'd once dismissed as an unusually vivid dream now resembles what dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley refers to as a “big dream,” an experience so psychologically and emotionally impactful that it permanently remains in memory. More accounts and research involving dreams and visitation experiences can be found here and here.

Since confirming Hans’s historical identity in 2015, the nocturnal visitations have become increasingly consistent. These reunions are often affectionate and intellectually animated. We are frequently loquacious with one another, eager to exchange ideas, memories, and experiences. Sometimes Hans is there to share about his former life in Germany. Other times, Hans communicates indirectly through letters, symbols, gestures, or fragmented speech that becomes partially erased by the amnesic effects of sleep. He has also acknowledged interfering with some of my recollections, choosing to withhold certain transmissions for reasons he has not always disclosed.

The following out-of-body experience (OBE)/visitation dream was documented on January 7, 2019 at 04:38. The account has been edited from its original format, captured through speech recognition on my iPhone. What follows is both the original dream account (edited) and the poem that later emerged from it.

The Dream Account: Walking Together in Your Small German Town

You stop walking and say to me, "I love your floral-patterned dress the most, the one with the little pink flowers. Trage es wieder für mich, wear it again for me."

I meet up with you again. We are walking together through recently tilled muddy fields. The farmland stretches endlessly beneath an overcast sky. In the distance stands a dense colony of trees where the Black Forest begins.

At first, I don't know where we are. Then it dawns on me. This is your hometown in Germany from your most recent life.

I turn toward you and realize that you have appeared as a young man in your early twenties. You were beautiful then. As we continue walking, your body begins cycling through different ages, moving from adolescence to old age in shifting intervals while we ceaselessly speak about things that remain unclear and inaudible.

You stop walking and say to me, “I love your floral-patterned dress the most, the one with the little pink flowers. Trage es wieder für mich, wear it again for me.” This is the only thing I remember you saying for the duration of our walk.

Suddenly, I’m standing before my closet, though it looks nothing like the one in my waking life, searching for the dress before realizing I had discarded it years earlier. Crushed by the revelation, I dress myself in a pink floral-patterned skirt and gray tank top instead.

We are walking together again, and you are older now, in your late sixties. We leave the field and begin walking through the streets of your village while I admire the buildings of the place where you once lived and died.

We stop in front of your house. You glance toward the windows while shifting in your stance. Your wife, who is also deceased, is inside.

You look at me with downturned eyes and say, “I have to go. We're hosting a party.”

I glance toward the front door framed in block glass, then look back toward you, but you are gone. A sharp ache develops in my chest before settling into a strange feeling of aloneness.

Now I'm standing in the annex of your living room while you, your wife, and several of your friends gather a short distance away. Throughout the encounter I want you to acknowledge my presence, yet simultaneously fear that my appearance there might upset you. I can sense you sensing me, but you maintain your distance for the remainder of the dream.

Below is a poem I wrote inspired by the visitation account above.

Another life beyond the one with me

This is a gathering of ghosts. You didn’t summon me to join you tonight, I found my way to you unannounced, working my way into your domain, a crasher of afterlife parties.

The recently tilled fields are muddy.

You have arrived as a young man in your early twenties,

then you cycle through your ages from adolescence to old age.

We walk without purpose

and talk about things that remain muffled, inaudible.

You stop walking

and lock your eyes onto mine with devotion

(or is it lust?).

You take my hand and say,

“I love your floral-patterned dress--

Trage es wieder für mich,”

wear it for me again.

For the duration of the walk, you remain

an old man sporting a beguiling gaze that

collides with nostalgia in the small German town

where you had lived and died.

Standing before your house,

you glance over at the windows,

shifting in your stance several times.

You look at me with downturned eyes.

"I have to go. We are hosting a party,"

You say, heart decaying beneath a button-down shirt,

your German accent is as thick as a callus.

And just like that, you're gone.

I settle into my aloneness that feels eternal

(a hyperbole for a man of understatements).

Dearest twin of fierce independence,

you are half intact like me.

I’m now in the annex of your living room.

You, your wife, and your friends

congregate a short distance away.

See me, see me, I hurl toward you.

Then I understand.

This is a gathering of ghosts.

You didn’t summon me to join you tonight,

I found my way to you unannounced,

working my way into your domain,

crasher of afterlife parties.

I sense you sensing me,

you're impressed that I've figured it out.

Kiss me, kiss me! I shoot another thought toward you,

drunk on your presence,

but you keep your distance.

You have another life

beyond the one with me,

so I leave your airy world

and return to the firmness of my bed.

Poetry as Inquiry

Poetry is one of the few mediums through which I can process experiences such as visitation dreams because it allows emotional, paranormal, and transpersonal material to coexist without needing to fully explain them (Wu, 2021). Through metaphor, imagery, and text fragmentation, poetry can communicate emotion with an immediacy prose often can't achieve (Richardson, 1994, as cited in Wu, 2021; Sharma, 2020), while simultaneously giving shape to experiences that resist ordinary language (Prendergast & Galvin, 2012, as cited in Wu, 2021). In this sense, poetic inquiry becomes both expressive and investigative, engaging “internal and external” (Sullivan, 2012, p. 92, as cited in Wu, 2021, p. 286) dimensions of experience while allowing emotionally intense autobiographical material to surface through symbolic and layered forms of meaning-making (Sharma, 2020).

Because poetic writing can reveal meanings that only become visible after the poem itself has been completed (Raingruber, 2004, as cited in Sharma, 2020), writing may become a process of discovery, reflection, and reinterpretation rather than merely documenting experience. This process aligns with what Sharma (2020) describes as “transforming-self-through-writing” (p. 174), wherein painful narratives are reshaped into more life-affirming forms of understanding. Such approaches also challenge conventional academic discourse, where science and art are frequently treated as distinct and incompatible forms of inquiry (Leavy, 2010). Rather than treating research as a rigid procedure, poetic and arts-based inquiry approach research as an evolving process of searching and re-examination (Leavy, 2010), creating space for emotionally complex, spiritually ambiguous, and unconventional lived experiences that mainstream academic discourse often leaves little room for.

The dream account and accompanying poem presented here emerged through that process of searching. Rather than remaining separate creative works, they gradually became intertwined forms of documentation, reflection, grief processing, and spiritual inquiry. The movement from nocturnal experience to written account to poetry allowed emotional and paranormal dimensions of the encounter to surface in ways that academic language alone couldn't contain. In many respects, the work exists at the intersection of autobiography, dream documentation, poetic research, and transpersonal experience.

References

Leavy, P. (2010). A/r/t: A poetic montage. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(4), 240–243. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800409354067

Sharma, D. (2020). Writing poems: A waste of time or a savior of life – an autoethnographic exploration. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 33(3), 164–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2020.1776967

Wu, B. (2021). My poetic inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(2), 283–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420912800