PRECOGNITION AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
Precognitive dreams indicate that the psyche has foreknowledge far beyond our waking selves.
If such dreams really do occur, then we must consider that the unconscious, from which dreams arise, has a different relation to time than we experience in ordinary consciousness. In usual conscious life, the experience of time is inescapable.
However much we may prefer to hold onto a present experience, the flow of time moves steadily onward, and what is present and real to our continual dissolution of the present can create in us a sense of the impermanence of all things-a sense which inspired the central insights of Buddhist thought.
The Christian vision answers to this experience with the kingdom of Heaven, a permanent place that is immune to decay and change.
At the bedrock of western philosophy, Plato envisioned a world of ideal forms, “in the heavens,” that are eternal and unchanging, while what we see as “reality” consists of mere shadows on earth of these everlasting forms.
Precognitive dreams suggest that the Self, as the maker of dreams, is independent of time and thus vastly different from the waking-ego, the everyday self. What is a time-bound process to the ego may simply be “present” to the Self, although it is difficult to imagine what “present” means to a point of view outside of time as we know it.
Being outside of time is not equivalent to being eternal, rather it resembles the state of the gods of mythology: beings relatively eternal and all-powerful in comparison to the brieflives and limited powers of humankind.
Perhaps the most provocative precognitive dreams are those which concern death-the most overarching problem in the strange process of being human.
I would like to present two dreams concerned with death. I have chosen them as examples because, within each dream itself, the significance of the death image is addressed.
These dreams show, therefore, how the psyche itself speaks of death.
In his autobiographical volume, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung recounts his dream of his wife Emma a year after her death.
In his dream, she appears on a stage; yet he knows that this is not Emma herself. Instead it is some kind of three-dimensional “portrait” that she has commissioned in order to show him, by means of the dream, that she is safe and secure, and that he need not worry about her.
This dream-image is understood within Jung’s dream itself, then, as having been discarnate personal agency,” or in common language, the surviving soul of the deceased.
If dreams point to a reality that cannot be more clearly symbolized at the present time, perhaps Jung’s dream points to a reality that has been affirmed for millennia by religious traditions of a vast number of cultures-the survival of the soul.
Is it possible that Jung’s dream-image of his wife Emma was indeed an inner reference to a postmortem reality?
Evidence for such a belief might be found by looking for similar dreams, reported by other persons.
In my own practice, I have encountered such a dream.
It was reported to me by a physician, the son of a medical missionary, within three months of his father’s death.
I see my father.
His image speaks and says that it is not, in reality, my actual father.
Rather, it is an existing image of the father, used by another consciousness, a messenger, to communicate to me that my actual father is safe [like Emma], but “far away” and unable himself to communicate at this time.
My father is said to be at peace, a welcome contrast to his troubled and turbulent life.
What conclusions are we to draw from Jung’s dream of Emma, the physician’s dream of his missionary father, and many other such dreams? It is entirely possible, in the light of Jungian dream theory, that these dreams indicate an actual after-death survival of the deceased personality, which uses an ability to influence the dream imagery of the living (at least of those close to them in life) in order to convey a reassurance about the continuation of life beyond the death of the physical body.
The survival after death is an age-old archetypal theme in the history of humankind, and I cannot possibly give adequate treatment to it here.
Any good orthodox Jungian would expect this theme to occur as an archetypal image even if there were no actual survival.
We all, of course, will ultimately conduct our own “experiment” in surviving death. None, or at most very few, will return to tell us with any certainty of a “beyond.”
If the dead survive, they likely place little value in telling us about it. And yet we, the living, place great value in knowing if the human personality, or a significant part of it, survives physical death.
To live with the belief of final annihilation, though it may be noble, is certainly different than living as though life will go on indefinitely into the future, even in altered form.
One of the most useful explorations of the meaning of death in relation to dreams is Marie-Louise von Franz’s On
Dreams and Death.
In her usual scholarly and incisive manner, von Franz probes the images of death in culture and in dreams.
The book must be read in its entirety, but one of the reams she cites has stayed vivid in my mind.
A woman was dying and knew this fact. She was very frightened of death until only a few hours before her actual physical death, when she awoke from a brief sleep. She reported a dream to her nurse and a few hours later died peacefully.
This dream seemed to alter her life profoundly, although she had only a few remaining hours. She dreamed that a candle was burning in the window of her room.
As it burned lower and began to flicker, she realized that she would die when it went out entirely, and she was afraid. The candle sputtered and went out.
For a moment there was complete darkness; but then the
candle was burning again, on the outside of the window pane!
If the flickering candle symbolized the fading organic lifeof her body, what was symbolized by the re-lit candle on the outside of the clear window pane? Who can say? Perhaps the candle’s flame was a symbol of the essence of life, continuing “outside,” in a space which is not bounded like the room.
Was this dream a mere compensation for the conscious fear of dying? Or was it perhaps a self-representation of the state of the psyche: the psyche that may “know” more than consciousness?
Perhaps the psyche has experienced death repeatedly and sees it not only as an end but as a transition.
Whatever it reveals about the state of the psyche, the candle dream did what dreams at their best are supposed to do: it prepared the woman’s ego for the next stage of life. In this case the next stage was death-the end of life as we know it consciously.
The dream allowed her to live fully and actively right to the end, rather than being dragged to her death by the
inexorable decline of her physical body.
The “what” and “why” of images in our dreams cannot be settled with any certainty.
My own view is based upon intuitions ranging over a vast number of dreams from a wide array of patients over several decades of practice as a Jungian analyst.
I believe that images in dreams are clearly symbols, not signs, and that they point to a deeper reality than that of the everyday world in which we live our lives.
As the two “message” dreams discussed above suggest, the psyche can itself indicate that dreams are “sent” and that the images in them are used to convey indirectly something that cannot be shown or demonstrated directly.
We cannot know if such dreams finally indicate human survival over bodily death, even though it is a universal archetypal theme.
As a research question, survival after death is an immensely complicated affair. J.B. Rhine points this out in an address to the Texas Society for Psychical Research, which happened to fall on Easter Sunday, 1977
He says:
When I was a child I remember the concept of Easter as being a day of the promise of the literal resurrection. But by the time I went to high school, it was a symbolic resurrection. By the time I got to college, where I was a pre-ministerial student, the concept was something else; not resurrection but a promise of a spiritual existence of some kind that wasn’t very clear. Further on in my college career,
I had to throw the whole thing out. I didn’t know what to accept. I couldn’t see the basis for any of it in my studies in the sciences, to which I was drawn very strongly, especially psychology and biology. Still further on, by this time a graduate student, I heard about mediums and psychical research and the idea that life after death was something, an existence with which you could come to terms-you could do something about it.
Dr. Rhine then went on to review the history and frustration of his attempts to research the question of survival after death.
There seemed at first to be striking evidence from mediums that surviving disincarnate personalities could convey information to living persons, but the investigation became almost impossible to interpret.
This was because evidence for extrasensory perception by the living became much more convincing.
It appeared uncertain whether the medium was receiving messages from actual surviving personal agencies, or was unconsciously dramatizing spirit communication using information gained by the medium’s own extrasensory perception (ESP) from living persons and existing sources.
Because of these difficulties in interpretation, Rhine finally abandoned direct investigation of the survival question and focused his efforts instead on the laboratory investigation of psi (ESP) abilities in living subjects.
In his Easter Sunday address, however, he again took up the survival question and in fact gave some suggestions as to how it might be approached experimentally.
I had the opportunity to discuss the question of survival after death with Marie-Louise von Franz in late summer of 1989.
Even though she was ill, she was kind enough to have tea with me at her country retreat in the little Swiss farming community of Bollingen, the same village where Jung built his tower.
There was no electricity and the tea kettle was boiling over an open fire on the hearth.
Since Dr. von Franz had delved more deeply than anyone I knew into the questions of dreams and the meaning of death, I asked for her personal views. Like a true empiricist, she said:
“When the time comes for my own death, then I will know-or perhaps I won’t be there at all and can’t ask the question.”
I pressed the point by asking about the possibility of reincarnation.
“If there is reincarnation,” I wondered, “what kind of person would you like to come back as and where would you like to be born?”
She paused a moment and then stated emphatically:
“I want to come back as myself”
I took this as a very fitting reply to an impossible question.
“Being oneself” is, after all, the meaning of Jung’s primary understanding of life as the unfolding process of individuation:
realizing in actual life one’s innate potentiality. I believe Dr.
von Franz both knows and exemplifies that truth. ~James A. Hall, The Unconscious Christian, Precognitions and Life After Death, Page 64-70
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