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.[177]
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, 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 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 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 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). 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 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]
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
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 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
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,
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 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
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]
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 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 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 177: I may refer to the very interesting discussion by Professor
G. F. Stout (_Analytic Psychology_, vol. ii. p. 145) of the conflict of
systems in apperception, and of the suspense and deadlock which occur when
two or more systems come into conflict in such a way that the success of
one is the defeat of the other. The discussion is full of interest from
its undesigned bearing on the phenomena of dreaming.]
[Footnote 178: Foucault, for instance (_Le Rêve_, p. 25), discusses
and illustrates dreams of this type. I am not here concerned with the
causation of this type of dream. Perhaps, as Wundt believes, it is due
to some physical discomfort of the sleeper, such as a cramped position,
expressing itself symbolically.]
[Footnote 179: It may be added that dreams of returning to the school
scenes of early life are not necessarily always of the type here
described, as may be illustrated by the dream already brought forward on
p. 83, which, it is worth while noticing, occurred after a day on which I
had been thinking over the dreams of this class.]
[Footnote 180: I reproduce these two series in the same form as first
published (Havelock Ellis, 'On Dreaming of the Dead,' _Psychological
Review_, September 1895) since they have formed the starting point of my
own and others' investigation into this type of dream.]
[Footnote 181: It is well known, and has often been pointed out (by
Weygandt, Sante de Sanctis, Jewell, etc., and perhaps first by T. Beddoes
in his _Hygeia_, 1803, vol. iii. p. 88), that while in childhood all the
emotions of the past day are at once echoed in dreams, after adolescence,
this is not so in the case of intense emotions, which do not emerge
in dreams until after a more or less considerable interval. Marie de
Manacéïne and Sante de Sanctis attribute this to exhaustion of the emotion
which needs a period of repair and organic synthesis before it can repeat
itself. Vaschide believed that we dream of recent events in shallow sleep
and of remote events in deep sleep; this sounds plausible, but will
scarcely account for all the phenomena.]
[Footnote 182: Since the publication of my paper 'On Dreaming of the
Dead,' several psychologists have returned to the subject. Thus Binet
(_L'Année Psychologique_, 2nd year, issued in 1896, p. 848) gave a dream
of his own, very similar to mine of the editor, in which a doctor, dead
a month previously, is talking to him in his room. On Binet expressing
surprise at seeing him, the doctor explains that he had only sent news of
his death in order to see how many people would come to his funeral. Binet
has also had two dreams, similar to that described on p. 200, in which he
is walking in the country with a dead friend, who seems in good health,
though the dreamer knows he will soon die. Foucault (_Le Rêve_, p. 128),
who, in accordance with his own theory, regards my dream of the editor as
belonging to the period of awakening, brings forward a dream of his own
in which he saw his father, dead six months before, sitting in a chair;
at first this seems to him a hallucination, but he finally accepts the
vision as real. I have had a number of letters from people who have had
dreams of this type. One correspondent, an anthropologist and folk-lorist
of note, says that his dreams of dead friends are of the type of Mrs.
F.'s. Professor Näcke writes that he has had such dreams (and see also
his articles in the _Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie_, 1903, p. 307, and
the _Neurologisches Centralblatt_, 1910, No. 13). One young lady states
that, thirteen years after her mother's death, she still dreams of her as
coming to life again or never having really died. I may add that this type
of dream is admirably illustrated in a series of dreams concerning a dead
friend, published in a letter from a lady to _Borderland_, January 1896,
p. 51.]
[Footnote 183: Gassendi, _Syntagma Philosophicum_, 1658, pars. 71, lib.
viii. (_Opéra Omnia_, vol. i.).]
[Footnote 184: Maury, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_, p. 145.]
[Footnote 185: _American Journal of Psychology_, July-October, 1903, p.
18.]
[Footnote 186: Chabaneix, _Le Subconscient chez les Artistes, les
Savants et les Ecrivains_, 1897, pp. 45-8. Chabaneix was in touch with
various persons of distinction, and one is inclined to identify the
poet-philosopher with Sully-Prudhomme, at that time still living. Du
Maurier's remarkable novel, _Peter Ibbetson_--which records similar serial
dreams of union with a beloved woman after death, and seems to be based on
real experience--may also be mentioned in this connection.]
[Footnote 187: Unconscious dream suggestions of this kind resemble, as
R. MacDougall has remarked (_Psychological Review_, March 1898, p. 167),
post-hypnotic suggestions.]
[Footnote 188: This type of dream--in which the emotion of the day
is inverted in sleep, depressing emotions giving place to exalting
emotions, and so on--is by some (Griesinger, Lombroso, Sante de Sanctis,
etc.), termed the contrast-dream. The dream is in such a case, Sante
de Sanctis remarks, complementary, having the same significance as a
complementary after-image and indicating a phase of anabolic repair.
Thus A. Wiggam (_Pedagogical Seminary_, June 1909), gives the case of
a girl of twenty, who when tired and restless always has good dreams,
while her dreams are bad when she is well and free from care. It should
be added that, as understood by Näcke ('Ueber Kontrast-Träume' _Archiv
für Kriminalanthropologie_, 1907), a contrast-dream is one that is in
striking contrast to the dreamer's ordinary character. In this type of
contrast-dream it is not quite clear that the mechanism is the same, and
the contrast may sometimes be accidental. Thus a dream of being a soldier
on a battlefield, with shells bursting around me, was merely suggested by
a passage of Nietzsche, read in the evening, which contained the words
'the thunders of the battle of Wörth,' and the question of contrast or
resemblance to my character and habits was irrelevant.]
[Footnote 189: _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, July-December
1904, p. 339.]
[Footnote 190: See Herbert Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_, 3rd ed.,
1885, vol. i. ch. x., especially pp. 140, 182, 201, 772. Spencer believed
that Lubbock was the first to point out this factor in primitive beliefs,
which has been chiefly developed by Tylor. It is, of course, by no means
the only factor. See _post_, p. 266.]
[Footnote 191: Thus Professor Beaunis (_loc. cit._) considers that dreams
furnish the only rational explanation of the belief in survival after
death. Jewell, again (_American Journal of Psychology_, January 1905),
also considers that dreams are responsible for primitive man's inability
to conceive of death as ending our association with our friends; he
brings forward evidence, highly significant in this connection, to show
that children, on dreaming of the dead as alive, are influenced in waking
life to doubt the reality of their death. Ruths, also writing since
the publication of my first paper (_Experimental-Untersuchungen über
Musikphantome_, 1898, pp. 438 _et seq._), considers that the conception of
an under-world is founded on dreams of the dead coming to life.]