DREAMS OF THE DEAD

The World of Dreams by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. DREAMS OF THE DEAD

VIII. DREAMS OF THE DEAD

Mental Dissociation during Sleep—Illustrated by the Dream of Returning to School Life—The Typical Dream of a Dead Friend—Examples—Early Records of this Type of Dream—Analysis of such Dreams—Atypical Forms—The Consolation sometimes afforded by Dreams of the Dead—Ancient Legends of this Dream Type—The Influence of Dreams on the Belief of Primitive Man in the Survival of the Dead.

Our memories tend to fall into groups or systems. We all possess a great number of such systematised groups of impressions. Every period of life, every subject we have occupied ourselves with, every intimate friend we have had, each represents a more or less separate mass of ideas and feelings. Within each system one idea or feeling easily calls up another belonging to the same system. Moreover, in full and alert waking life, each system is in touch with the systems related to it. If there crowd into the field of consciousness the memories belonging to one period of life, or one country we have lived in, we can control and criticise those memories by reference to others belonging to another period or another country. If we are overwhelmed by the thoughts and emotions associated with the memory of one friend we can restore our mental balance by evoking the thoughts and emotions associated with another friend. The various systems are in this way co-ordinated in apperception.

In sleep, however, these groups are not usually so firmly held together by the cords along which we can move in our waking moments from one to the other. They are, as it were, loosened from their moorings, and on the sea of sleeping consciousness they drift apart or jostle together in new and what seem to be random associations. This is that process of dissociation which we find so marked in dreaming, and in all those psychic phenomena—hallucinations, hysteria, multiple personality, insanity—which are allied to dreaming.

A simple illustration of the clash and confusion of two opposing systems of memories in dreams, when due apperceptive control is lacking, is supplied by a common and well-recognised type of dream, the dream of returning to the school of youth.[178] Many people are occasionally liable to this dream, which is often vivid and disturbing. We may have left the schoolroom thirty years or more ago, and never seen it since; it may have vanished from our waking thoughts. Yet from time to time we find ourselves there in our dreams,[196] and called upon to take our old place, always with a sense of conflict, a vague discomfort, a feeling of something incongruous and humiliating, for we realise that we are now too old. Here is a dream in illustration: I find myself back at my old school, but my old schoolmaster is not there; he is away ill, as I am told by his substitute, whose face somehow seems familiar, though I cannot recall where I have seen it. I do not know any of the boys; I am returning after an absence of some months. I realise that I am to take my old place again, and yet I feel a profound repulsion to do so, a sense that it is somehow incongruous. This latter feeling seems to prevail, for I finally assume the part of a visitor, and remark, insincerely, to the master that it is pleasant to see the old place again.

In such a case as this it seems that a picture from an ancient system of memories floats across the field of sleeping consciousness, and the dreamer is naturally drawn into that system and begins to adapt himself to its demands. But, as he does so, the influence of other later and incompatible systems of memories begins unconsciously to affect the dreamer.[179] The cords of connection, however, which when awake would enable him to adjust critically the opposing systems, are not acting; apperception is defective. Yet the opposing systems are there, outside the immediate[197] field of consciousness, and jostling the ancient system which has come into the central focus. Finally this jostling of the ancient system by more recent systems causes a harmonising modification in consciousness. The dreamer ceases to be a boy in his old school, and assumes the part of a visitor.

Dreams of our recently dead friends furnish a type of dream which is formed in exactly the same way as these dreams of a return to school life. The only difference is that they often present it in a more vivid, pronounced, and poignantly emotional shape. This is so, partly from the very subject of such dreams, and partly because the fact of death definitely divides our impressions of our dead friends into two groups, which are intimately allied to each other by their subject, and yet absolutely opposed by the fact that in the one group the friend is alive, and in the other dead.

I proceed to present two series of dreams—one in a man, the other in a woman—illustrating this type of dream.[180]

Observation I.—Mr. C., age about twenty-eight, a man of scientific training and aptitudes. Shortly after his mother's death he repeatedly dreamed that she had come to life again. She had been buried, but it was somehow found out that she was not really dead. Mr. C. describes the painful intellectual struggles that went on in these dreams, the arguments in favour of[198] death from the impossibility of prolonged life in the grave, and how these doubts were finally swallowed up in a sense of wonder and joy because his mother was actually there, alive, in his dream.

These dreams became less frequent as time went on, but some years later occurred an isolated dream which clearly shows a further stage in the same process. Mr. C. dreamed that his father had just returned home, and that he (the dreamer) was puzzled to make out where his mother was. After puzzling a long time he asked his sister, but at the very moment he asked it flashed upon him—more, he thinks, with a feeling of relief at the solution of a painful difficulty than with grief—that his mother was dead.

Observation II.—Mrs. F., age about thirty, highly intelligent but of somewhat emotional temperament. A week after the death of a lifelong friend to whom she was greatly attached, Mrs. F. dreamed for the first time of her friend, finding that she was alive, and then in the course of the dream discovering that she had been buried alive.

A second dream occurred on the following night. Mrs. F. imagined that she went to see her friend, whom she found in bed, and to whom she told the strange things that she had heard (i.e., that the friend was dead). Her friend then gave Mrs. F. a few things as souvenirs. But on leaving the room Mrs. F. was told that her friend was really dead, and had spoken to her after death.

In a fourth dream, at a subsequent date, Mrs. F. imagined that her friend came to her, saying that she[199] had returned to earth for a few minutes to give her messages and to assure her that she was happy in another world and in the enjoyment of the fullest life.

Another dream occurred more than a year later. Some one brought to Mrs. F., in her dream, the news that her friend was still alive; she was taken to her and found her as in life. The friend said she had been away, but did not explain where or why she had been supposed dead. Mrs. F. asked no questions and felt no curiosity, being absorbed in the joy of finding her friend still alive, and they proceeded to talk over the things that had happened since they last met. It was a very vivid, natural, and detailed dream, and on awaking Mrs. F. felt somewhat exhausted. Although not superstitious, the dream gave her a feeling of consolation.

The next series has been observed more recently. I include all the dreams and the intervals at which they occurred. The somewhat unexpected news reached me of the death of a near and lifelong friend when I was myself recovering from an attack of influenza. No dream which could be connected with this event occurred until about a fortnight later[181] (16th January).[200] I then dreamed that I was with my friend and asking him (he had been a clergyman and Biblical scholar) whether, in his opinion, Jesus had been able to speak Greek. I awoke before I received his answer, but no sort of doubt, hesitation, or surprise was aroused by his appearance alive.

Nineteen days later (4th February) occurred the next dream. This time I dreamed that my friend was just dead, and that I was gazing at a postcard of good wishes, written partly in Latin, which he had sent me a few days before (on the actual date of my birthday), and regretting that I had not answered it. There was no doubt in my mind as to the fact of his death. (I may remark that the last letter I had written to my friend was on his birthday, and he had been unable to reply, so that there was here one of those reversals which Freud and others have noted as not uncommon in dreams.)

The next dream occurred thirty-four days later (10th March). I thought that I met my friend, and at once realised that it was not he but his wife who had died, and I clasped his hand sympathetically.

Some months later (27th July) I again dreamed that I was walking with my friend and talking, as we might have talked, on topics of common interest. But at the same time I knew, and he knew that I knew, that he was to die on the morrow.

Once more, a fortnight later (10th August), I dreamed that I had an appointment to meet my friend in a certain road, but he failed to appear. I began to wonder[201] whether he had forgotten the appointment, or I had made a mistake, and I was seeking for the letter making the appointment when I awoke.

It would appear that the dreams of this type are less pronounced in the ratio of the less pronounced affectional intensity of the relationship which unites the friends. The next dream concerned a man for whom I had the highest esteem and regard, but had not been intimately associated with. I dreamed that I saw this friend, who was the editor of a psychological journal, alive and well in his room, together with two foreign psychologists also known to me, who had apparently succeeded him in the editorship of the journal, for I saw their names on the title-page of a number of it which was put in my hands. It surprised me that, though alive and well, he should have ceased to edit the journal; the theory by which I satisfactorily accounted to myself for his appearance was that, though he had been so near death that his life was despaired of, he had not actually died; his death had been prematurely reported. It flashed across my dream consciousness, indeed, that I had read obituaries of my friend in the papers, but this reminiscence merely suggested the reflection that some one had been guilty of a grave indiscretion.[182]

[202]

Although no attempt had been made to analyse this type of dream before 1895, the dream itself had often been noted down, as from its poignant and affecting character it could not fail to be. An early example is furnished by the philosopher Gassendi, who states that he dreamed he met a friend, that he greeted him as one returned from the dead, and that then, saying to himself in his dream that this was impossible, he concluded that he must be dreaming.[183] Pepys, again, in his Diary, on the 29th June 1667, a few months after his mother's death, dreamed that 'my mother told me she lacked a pair of gloves, and I remembered a pair of my wife's in my chamber, and resolved she should have them, but then recollected [reflected] how my mother came to be here when I was in mourning for her, and so thinking it to be a mistake in our thinking her all this while dead, I did contrive that it should be said to any that inquired[203] that it was my mother-in-law, my wife's mother, that was dead, and we in mourning for.' This dream, Pepys adds, 'did trouble me mightily.' Edmond de Goncourt, in his Journal (27th July 1870), well describes how in the first dream of the dead brother to whom he was so tenderly attached, the two streams of memories appeared. He dreamed he was walking with his brother, but at the same time he knew he was in mourning for him, and friends were coming up to offer condolences; the emotions caused by the conflict of these two certainties—his brother's life affirmed by his presence and his death affirmed by all the other circumstances of the dream—was profoundly distressing. A few years earlier Renan, when his dearly loved sister Henrietta died by his side in the Lebanon, also had dreams of this type, which deeply affected even his cautious and sceptical nature. She had died of Syrian fever, from which he also was suffering, and shortly afterwards he wrote in a letter that 'in feverish dreams a terrible doubt has risen up before me; I have fancied I heard her voice calling to me from the vault where she was laid.' He comforted himself, however, with the thought that this horrible supposition was unjustified, since French doctors had been present at her death. Maury[184] also mentions that he had often had dreams of this type in which the dead appeared as living, though the sight of them always produced astonishment and doubt which the sleeping brain endeavoured to allay by some kind of explanation. Beaunis also describes[204] how he has dreamed with surprise of meeting a friend whom even in his dream he knew to be dead.[185]

It is not difficult, in the light of all that we have been able to learn regarding the psychology of the world of dreams, to account for the process here described, for its frequency, and for its poignant emotional effects. This dream type is only a special variety of the commonest species of dream, in which two or more groups of reminiscences flow together and form a single bizarre congruity, a confusion in the strict sense of the word. The death of a friend sets up a barrier which cuts into two the stream of impressions concerning that friend. Thus, two streams of images flow into sleeping consciousness, one representing the friend as alive, the other as dead. The first stream comes from older and richer sources; the second is more poignant, but also more recent and more easily exhausted. The two streams break against each other in restless conflict, both, from the inevitable conditions of dream life, being accepted as true, and they eventually mix to form an absurd harmony, in which the older and stronger images (in accordance with that recognised tendency for old psychic impressions generally to be most stable) predominate over those that are more recent. Thus, in the first observation the dreamer seems to have begun his dream by imagining that his mother was alive as of old; then his more recent experiences interfered with the assertion of her death. This resulted in a struggle between the old-established[205] images representing her as alive and the later ones representing her as dead. The idea that she had come to life again was evidently a theory that had arisen in his brain to harmonise these two opposing currents. The theory was not accepted easily; all sorts of scientific objections arose to oppose it, but there could be no doubt, for his mother was there. The dreamer is in the same position as a paranoiac who constantly seems to hear threatening voices; henceforth he is absorbed in inventing a theory (electricity, hypnotism, or whatever it may be) to account for his hallucinations, and his whole view of life is modified accordingly. The dreamer, in the cases I am here concerned with, sees an image of the dead person as alive, and is therefore compelled to invent a theory to account for this image; the theories that most easily suggest themselves are either that the dead person has never really died, or else that he has come back from the dead for a brief space. The mental and emotional conflict which such dreams involve renders them very vivid. They make a profound impression even after awakening, and for some sensitive persons are almost too sacred to speak of.

When a series of these dreams occurs concerning the same dead friend the tendency seems to be, on the whole—though there are certainly many exceptions—for the living reality of the vision of the dead friend to be more and more positively affirmed. Whether awake or asleep, it is very difficult for us to resist the evidence of our senses. It is even more difficult asleep than awake, for, as we have seen reason to believe,[206] apperception, with the critical control it involves, is weakened. Just as the savage or the child accepts as a reality the illusion of the sun traversing the sky, just as the paranoiac accepts the reality of the hallucinations he is subjected to, and gradually weaves them into a more or less plausible theory, so the dreamer seems to employ all the acutest powers of sleeping reason available to construct a theory in support of the reality of the visions of his dead friend.

Sometimes atypical dreams of the dead occur in which even from the first there appears little clash or doubt. When the vision can thus easily be accepted, it is sometimes a source of consolation, joy, and even religious faith which may still persist in the waking state. Chabaneix has, for instance, recorded the dream experiences of a poet and philosopher who had been deeply attached to a woman with whom his relations were both passionate and intellectual. From the night after her death onwards, at intervals, he had dreams of the beloved woman, at first appearing as a floating vision, later as a vividly seen and tangible person; these dreams caused refreshment and mental invigoration, and seemed to bring the dreamer into renewed communication with his dead friend.[186]

I am indebted to a clergyman for the record of a[207] somewhat similar experience. 'A close friendship,' he writes, 'once existed between myself and a lady, somewhat older, and of a religious temperament. We often discussed the life beyond the grave, and agreed that if she died first, and this appeared more than probable, as she was the victim of a mortal disease, she would appear to me. I may add that she was of a highly-strung and nervous nature, and though purely English had many of the psychic characteristics of the Celt. After her death, I looked for some appearance or manifestation, and about three days after dreamed that she had come back to me, and was discussing with me a matter which I much wished to speak about before her death, but was unable to, owing to her weakness and the presence of strangers. In the dream it was perfectly clear to me that she was a dead woman back from another sphere of existence. For some weeks after this I had similar experiences. They were never dreams of the old life and friendship before death, but always reappearances from the other world. Of course it may be said of this experience of mine, that it was merely the result of expectation. But I have found that the things most on my mind are rarely the subject of my dreams. Moreover, these dreams formed a series, lasting for weeks, and all of the same character, though the conversations differed.'

When a dreamer awakes in an emotional state which corresponds to a dream he has just experienced, it is usually a safe assumption that the dream was the result, and not the cause, of the emotional state. That is by[208] no means always the case, however, and in the type of dream we are here concerned with it is rarely the case. Even though it may be quite true that an emotional state evoked the dream, it is equally true that in its turn the dream itself may arouse an emotional state. The dream of encountering a celestial visitant, especially if the visitant is a beloved friend, cannot fail to produce an especial effect of this kind. It is noteworthy that the emotional influence may be present even when the fact of dreaming has not been recalled. Thus a lady who, on waking in the morning could not remember having dreamed, realised during the day that she was feeling as she was accustomed to feel after dreaming of a beloved friend, and was ultimately able to recall fragments of the dream.[187] A man of so great an intellect as Goethe has borne witness to the consoling influence of dreams. 'I have had times in my life,' he said, in old age, to Eckermann, 'when I have fallen asleep in tears, but in my dreams the loveliest figures come to give me comfort and happiness, and I awake next morning once more fresh and cheerful.'[188]

[209]

If we take a wide sweep we shall find in many parts of the world stories and legends concerning the relationship of the living with the dead which have a singular resemblance with the typical dream of the dead here investigated. Thus, in Japan, it appears that stories of the returning of the dead are very common. Lafcadio Hearn reproduces one, as told by a Japanese, which closely resembles some of the dreams we have met with. 'A lover resolved to commit suicide on the grave of his sweetheart. He found her tomb and knelt before it, and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him "Anata!" and felt her hand upon his hand: and he turned and saw her kneeling beside him, smiling and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said, "Do not doubt; it is really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried because my parents thought me dead—buried too soon. Yet you see I am not dead, not a ghost. It is I; do not doubt it!"' It is perhaps worth mentioning that the incident told in the Fourth Gospel (xx. 11-18) as[210] occurring to Mary Magdalene when at the tomb of Jesus, recalls the dream process of fusion of images. She turns and sees, as she thinks, the gardener, but in the course of conversation it flashes on her that he is Jesus, risen from the tomb. In quite another part of the world the Salish Indians of British Columbia have a story of a man who goes back to the spirit-world to reclaim his lost wife; this can only be done under special conditions, and for some time refraining to touch her; if he breaks these conditions she vanishes in his arms, and he is left alone.[189] That story, again, cannot fail to remind us of the almost identical Greek legend of the return of Orpheus to the under-world to reclaim his dead wife Eurydice. If these myths and legends were not directly based on the dream-process, it can only be on the ground, alleged with some force by Freud's school, that myths and legends themselves develop by means of the same mechanism as dreams.

The probable influence of dreams in originating or confirming the primitive belief of men in a spirit world has often been set forth. Herbert Spencer attached great importance to this factor in the constitution of the belief in another world, in spirits and in gods.[190] Wundt even considers that such dreams furnish the whole origin of animism. Other writers, less closely associated[211] with anthropological psychology, have argued in the same sense.[191]

But while these thinkers have in some cases specifically referred to dreams of the dead, and not merely to the widespread belief of savages that in sleep the soul leaves the body to wander over the earth, they have never realised that there is a special mechanism in the typical dream of a dead friend, due to mental dissociation during sleep, which powerfully suggests to us that death sets up no fatal barrier to the return of the dead. In dreams the dead are thus rendered indestructible; they cannot be finally killed, but rather tend to reappear in ever more clearly affirmed vitality. Dreams of this sort must certainly have come to men ever since men began to be. If their emotional effects are great to-day, we can well believe that they were much greater in the early days when dream life and what we call real life were less easily distinguished. The repercussion of this kind of dream through unmeasured ages cannot fail to have told at last on the traditions of the race.

About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books.

This book is part of the public domain. Havelock Ellis (2019). The World of Dreams. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59214/pg59214-images.html

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org, located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.