Note 182 — Chapter VIII

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.