Enjoy Christmas with your family. Eat well. Give and receive gifts. Play backyard cricket. This expectation that Christmas is a happy time with loved ones is very powerful.

For those recently bereaved however, this celebration of family and relationships can amplify feelings of grief about the missing loved one. I learnt about grief after my mother died in 2013. It was a very unpleasant time of life that only slowly started to make sense – helped in part by a dream about a fish hook. I hope my fishhook dream helps others who are experiencing the pain of grief during the festive season.

The grief experience is different for everyone. Credit:Louie Douvis

I'd previously read about grief, but the lived experience was unlike anything I could have imagined. For months after my mother died I had a very strong sense of unease. Sometimes I was sad. Other times very irritable and short tempered. And for much of the time I had an ill-defined sense that all was not well. I knew I was out of sorts, and I also knew that this was a feeling that I had never experienced before. It was uncharted territory, and very unpleasant in part because of this newness.

A few months after my mum died I had a very vivid and powerful dream. In the dream I had a fish hook caught in my finger. I pulled and pulled to get it out. Pulling against it hurt a lot, and it didn't seem to help at all – the hook was stuck. I still remember the chilling awareness I had the moment I realised that the only way this hook was coming out was by me pushing it through my finger. It was frightening to realise that I would have to cause myself more pain in order to be free of this hook.