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Paper short abstract

Contrary to the everyday understanding of dreams as “insignificant” and private experiences, dreams can function as a powerful mechanism for the continuation and re-shaping of relatedness with deceased, broadening the understanding of relationships with the dead beyond material practices.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores dreaming as a relational practice through which the living maintain, create, and re-shape relatedness with the dead. Contrary to everyday understandings of dreams as insignificant and private experiences, the study examines how dreaming becomes a meaningful arena in which relationships with deceased relatives continue and acquire social relevance within the Latvian context.

The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Latvia and includes 29 in-depth interviews with participants selected according to the principle of coevalness.

The findings show that dreams function as a powerful mechanism for the continuation of relatedness. Biographical dreams connect past and present, extend the biographies of both the living and the dead, and grant the deceased the status of social actors involved in the decision-making processes of the living. Through such dreams, relationships with the dead are not only remembered but actively lived and negotiated.

At the same time, the study demonstrates that the re-shaping of relationships with the deceased is not always a purely personal decision. In the Latvian context, it often emerges in response to social norms that frame dreaming as a private matter. As a result, dreams are frequently dismissed as “just dreams,” even as their social significance becomes visible through practices of selective sharing, narration, interpretation, and moral evaluation.

By analysing dreaming as both an experiential and social practice, this paper broadens anthropological understandings of relationships with the deceased beyond material practices of remembrance, showing how relatedness continues through dreams as a dynamic, embodied, and socially constituted process.