The World of Dreams

by Havelock Ellis

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]