It is a safe bet that you would have liked your mother to have met your new boyfriend.
Odysseus meets his dead mother Anticlea in the land of Hades, the underworld.
The dreamer appears to need approval regarding the special friend. The deceased mother could represent the dreamer's own inner parent - that part of the personality that is self-critical. Or the mother might represent the family and family tradition.
This is a comforting dream reflecting your mother's love that continues to bless you from beyond the limits of this life.
maybe your friend was in love with you or you were in love with him.
This dream seems to express the dreamer's grief, facing a vast, empty (?) future without the companionship of the lost friend.
To see the ghost of a friend or relative who has passed on in your dreams suggests guilt and regret concerning relations with that person.
The dream means that you are grieving the loss of your friend. Such dreams are very common shortly after a death, but they can continue on and off for many years. The feeling that your friend is not okay is a "projection" of your own feeling that his death was wrong and frustration that you could not prevent it.
The category "the dead" is far too broad to risk any single interpretation. Your dream's meaning depends on whether "the dead" in this particular dream referred to a beloved friend or relative, such as a grandmother, spouse or child, or whether "the dead" were overly dramatized Zombies or Horror film ghouls. The website linked below provides extended discussion of these and other possibilities.
A mother's concern for a child's well-being is often illustrated by the mother urging the child to eat their vegetables. So this dream expresses the dreamer's feeling the care and love of the mother even after her death.
When a mother dreams of an adolescent or adult child being dead, it is unlikely to be a forecast of actual death, but rather a symbolic expression of the mother feeling that she has lost that child through rebellion or physical absence or some other emotional or actual separation.
The dream suggests that something is wrong in your relationship. Often, if we want something so badly that we ignore obvious problems, our subconscious mind will produce an exaggerated, startling dream to nudge our conscious mind into paying attention. So this dream does not have anything to do with actual death, but perhaps to emotions or feelings that are dead or at least, slipping away.
Orestes and his friend, Pylades, went to the palace and claimed to bear a message that Orestes was dead.