There’s something that happens in the days after losing someone.

The world keeps moving at its usual pace, which feels offensive somehow, and you move through it feeling slightly out of sync. A song comes on that they loved. You find something of theirs in an unexpected place. You dream of them so vividly that waking up feels like the loss all over again.

Most of us dismiss these things. Coincidence, we say. Grief doing what grief does.

But what if some of them aren’t?

Reality Is Not As Solid As It Looks

The world our senses present to us is, at best, a simplified version of what’s actually there. And physics has been confirming this for over a century.

At the quantum level, matter is mostly empty space. Particles behave like waves until they’re observed — a phenomenon demonstrated in the famous double-slit experiment first conducted by physicist Thomas Young in 1801 and later refined through quantum mechanics by scientists like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Their work established what’s now called the Copenhagen interpretation: that reality at its most fundamental level is not fixed until it’s perceived. Energy, as the first law of thermodynamics tells us, doesn’t disappear. It transforms.

What appears solid and fixed to the naked eye is, underneath, fluid and alive with movement. There’s an entire energetic field surrounding us at every moment. We’re conscious of some of it: the physical world, the people in front of us, the objects we can touch. But that field contains more than what our rational minds have agreed to register. And the longer I’ve worked in this space, the more I believe that what we call spirits exist within that broader field. Right here, on a frequency we’ve mostly tuned out.

Why Children and Animals See What We’ve Stopped Seeing

This is something I’ve turned over for years. Why is it always the very young and the animals? Why do children report seeing things in rooms that adults walk through without a second glance? Why does the dog bark at an empty corner?

My honest belief is that we’re all born with the capacity to perceive beyond the visible world. Every one of us. Something closer to a birthright that most of us unlearn.

There’s research that points in this direction. Studies by developmental psychologist Dr. Erlendur Haraldsson, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, documented hundreds of cases of children between ages two and five reporting detailed memories and perceptions that couldn’t be explained by their immediate environment. Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia spent over forty years cataloguing similar cases, documenting more than 2,500 children who described verifiable details of lives they hadn’t lived — published across several volumes under the title Children Who Remember Previous Lives.

As children grow into the consensus reality around them, the sixth sense gets quieter. It doesn’t disappear. It gets buried under everything the rational mind decides is more credible, more acceptable, safer to acknowledge. Animals don’t go through this. They have no cultural framework telling them what’s real and what isn’t. So they keep sensing what they sense.

Most of us need something to crack us back open. A loss. A crisis. A moment so strange it doesn’t fit any other explanation.

The Door That Grief Opens

There’s a reason that contact with the unseen world tends to intensify around death. Grief strips away the noise. It makes you porous in a way ordinary life doesn’t. And people who’ve just passed still carry a presence that hasn’t fully dispersed.

A friend of mine told me something I’ve never been able to explain away. Her grandmother had been on palliative care, expected to pass any day. One night my friend dreamed that her father came into her room to tell her that her grandmother had died and they needed to go to the hospital. She woke with a start, looked at the clock — 5AM exactly — and went back to sleep.

An hour later, her father came into her room. Said the exact same thing. Her grandmother had died, they needed to go.

She told him he’d already told her. He said he hadn’t, that this was the first she was hearing it. Later that day she found out: her grandmother had passed at 5AM.

That kind of experience doesn’t have a folder in the rational mind. A message that arrived before the waking world was ready to carry it.

What Dreams Have Always Known

For as long as there have been people, dreams have been understood as the threshold. The place where the boundary between the living and the dead becomes something you can cross.

Ancient Egyptians built entire temples for dream incubation — a practice documented extensively by Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner in his studies of the Serapeum at Saqqara. People would sleep within sacred spaces for nights at a time, waiting to receive guidance or messages from the divine. In the Greek tradition, Morpheus was the messenger between realms, the god who could take any human form and deliver communications from the gods directly into a sleeping mind. The Greeks had at least three hundred known healing temples, called Asklepions, where the sick would sleep hoping to receive their cure in a dream.

Indigenous traditions across the world hold the dream world as a parallel reality operating under different rules. The Iroquois Confederacy, as documented by anthropologist Anthony Wallace in his 1958 paper Dreams and the Wishes of the Soul, believed that the soul expressed its deepest desires through dreams and that ignoring them caused illness. That the soul would find other, less gentle ways to be heard.

In many Eastern European cultures, certain dreams have long been read as omens. Dreaming of a hairy newborn baby is a traditional sign that a death is approaching in the family. I know a man who had exactly that dream. His father died the following morning.

What strikes me isn’t any single instance of these patterns. It’s how they repeat across cultures with no contact with each other, carrying the same meanings. Teeth falling out as a death omen appears in ancient Greek, Chinese, Arabic, and Native American dream traditions independently. Water as transformation. A departed loved one in white as a sign of peace. You can spend a long time deciding whether these mean something before realizing that people have been experiencing and recognizing them for as long as there have been people to have them.

The Smaller Signs

Dreams are the most vivid channel but they’re not the only one.

When my grandmother died, there was a ladybug walking along the edge of her coffin while we watched over her. We all laughed quietly and said it must be her soul. Nobody really meant it as anything more than comfort in a hard moment.

Then the ladybug followed us. All the way from the church to the cemetery on the day of the funeral.

At the parastas forty days later — a ceremony in Orthodox tradition held to honor the departed — another ladybug was at the cemetery, on the crypt. My aunt noticed it and thought to herself, not aloud, just a private thought: I’m the only one you don’t pay attention to, mother-in-law.

She got into the car after the ceremony. The ladybug was on her jacket sleeve.

I’ve heard enough stories like this to stop dismissing them. Lights flickering with no explanation. A device switching on by itself. A song on shuffle that is precisely the one this person would have chosen for this moment, and you know it before you consciously process it. The scent of someone, not triggered by anything visible, just suddenly there in a room where it has no business being.

These experiences share a quality that separates them from ordinary sensory noise. There’s a timing to them. A specificity. They tend to arrive when you’re in a raw emotional state, and they land with a weight that a coincidence doesn’t carry.

Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and researcher at Cambridge, has documented thousands of such accounts in his book The Sense of Being Stared At, arguing that perception extends beyond the boundaries of the body and that what we experience as coincidence often reflects real energetic connections between people and places. His work is controversial in mainstream science, which is worth knowing. It’s also worth knowing that controversy doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

How to Stay Open

Grief opens the channel, but it’s not the only way in. Stillness helps. Slowing the rational mind enough that quieter signals can get through.

Willingness matters too. A mind that has already decided none of this is real won’t notice what’s in front of it. We’re extraordinarily good at not seeing what we’ve told ourselves doesn’t exist.

Some people carry a sensitivity that never fully went dormant. If you’ve always felt the atmosphere of a room before you understood what you were picking up, if you’ve known things before being told, if you’ve dreamed things that later happened — you have more access to this frequency than you probably give yourself credit for. It doesn’t need to be frightening. It just needs to be met with some openness.

When something happens that doesn’t fit, don’t rush to explain it away. Sit with it. Ask, even just in your mind, what it might be trying to say. Pay attention to how you feel in the days after, whether something in you settles.

Grief might be one of the most spiritually alive states a person can be in. The loss tears something open. And through that opening, if you let yourself look, there’s often something looking back.

They’re still here. Just differently.