Signs from loved ones.

In a landmark 1971 study, psychiatrist W. Dewi Rees found that nearly half of widowed people reported sensing the presence of their deceased spouse. Subsequent research has consistently replicated this finding across cultures, religions, and demographics — and typically found even higher rates when people are asked in ways that make them feel safe to disclose.

These experiences are called post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences in the clinical literature — a clunky name for something that most people describe as deeply comforting and meaningful. They include seeing the person briefly, hearing their voice, feeling their touch, smelling a scent associated with them, or simply having a strong sense of their presence.

The research consistently shows that these experiences are associated with positive grief outcomes. People who have them tend to find them helpful. They are not a sign of complicated grief, denial, or instability. They are a normal and common part of human bereavement.

Signs take many forms. Some arrive through the senses: a scent that has no source, a song that plays at a moment that feels too precise to be random, a bird that lands close and stays. Others arrive through the body: a sudden warmth, a hand on the shoulder when the room is empty, a sense of being accompanied.

Dreams occupy their own category. Many grieving people report dreams in which the person who died appears vivid, present, and communicative in a way that feels qualitatively different from ordinary dreaming — less like memory and more like contact. These dreams are often described as deeply comforting, even when they are accompanied by grief.

Objects are another common medium. Finding something in an unexpected place, discovering a photograph or letter at the right moment, coming across something that belonged to them when it was not there before — these experiences are reported across cultures and with great frequency.

None of this is proof of anything, and this page will not claim that it is. What it is, is real experience, widely shared, with documented effects on grief outcomes. Whatever the mechanism, the comfort is real.

Many people who have these experiences find themselves cycling between two poles: insisting the experience was real, or dismissing it as wishful thinking. Both positions tend to create suffering. Certainty in either direction requires more than the evidence supports.

A more useful question is not “is this real?” but “how does this land?” Many people describe experiences that feel like genuine contact as arriving with a particular quality: a quieting rather than a heightening, a sense of recognition rather than projection, a feeling that is calmer than longing and less effortful than imagination. This is not proof. But it is information worth paying attention to.

Learning to trust your own inner knowing — discerning what is intuition and what is the mind generating what it needs — is a skill that develops with practice. This is part of what Nubbia works with in Spirit Connection Mentorship: not teaching you what to believe, but helping you develop the clarity to distinguish what is genuinely available to you.

Not experiencing these signs does not mean the person is absent, that you are not sufficiently open, or that something is wrong with your grief. Not everyone has these experiences. Some people notice them much later, sometimes years after the loss. Some notice them only in retrospect, when looking back at a pattern they did not register in the moment.

If you want to cultivate more openness to this kind of awareness — without manufacturing experiences that are not genuinely there — breathwork and meditative practice can help. Not by producing signs, but by quieting the static enough that what is available becomes more perceptible.