Kendrick Lamar: Tupac Appeared to Me in a Dream

In July 2011, rapper Kendrick Lamar from Compton recounted in a conversation with HipHopDX, picked up by Complex on July 13, a night that stayed with him: Tupac had appeared to him in his sleep and told him to keep going and not let his music die.

“That Scared the Hell Out of Me”

Kendrick described the encounter without pathos. The dream had scared him to death, he said in effect. At the same time, he understood it as a mission: he was carrying forward the message that Tupac had wanted to convey to the people around him, making his music for his environment, for his city, and for a higher power.

The anecdote did not remain an isolated incident. In the following years, Kendrick Lamar repeatedly referenced Tupac, culminating in a fictional conversation with him on record. How this connection evolved is traced on the page Kendrick Lamar and Tupac. As early as 2012, he recalled in an interview Tupac’s video shoot in Compton, which he had witnessed as a child; the report Kendrick Lamar and the “California Love” Shoot recounts this.