With a broad approach to the phenomena of mental life in the process of dying, especially in the phase of clinical death, it is possible to say that they are, as it were, varieties of human dreams. This is a special kind of dream.
On the other hand, many dreams reflect the problems associated with death, images and thoughts appear in which the sleeper foresees both his own death and the death of other people, and often with the help of symbols. Therefore, it can be argued that psychological thanatology and the psychology of dreams are closely interrelated areas of modern psychology. Considering these interrelationships, perhaps we can find new areas of research on mental phenomena, which are only outlined now.
Here we will consider how a person in his dreams can foresee and anticipate his own death.
The analysis of a person's dreams that preceded his death is of interest for several reasons. The first of them is that to face the inevitable end means to experience the deepest frustration and mental shock. There is no doubt that a person needs to mobilize all his defenses and capabilities against such existential frustration. The study of such states makes it possible to learn a lot about the abilities of mental self-defense of people.
The second reason is as follows: the expectation of death can activate in the human psyche such abilities that were previously poorly developed, “dozing” in the depths of the psychic world. For the disclosure and development of some abilities, a person must experience profound mental changes, excitement and conversion, radical shifts in his inner world. Waiting for death causes changes that are reflected in people's dreams. Therefore, the study of people's dying dreams requires special attention.
In the field of psychology, the famous CG Jung, a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, a philosopher, who at the beginning of his career was a follower of Freud, paid some attention to the study of dreams preceding the death of a person. He was interested in the dreams of hopelessly sick people who no longer had salvation.
He believed that in such a critical state "the unconscious is powerfully agitated." The person recalls the impressions of the early years of his life. Approaching the moment of death, a person in his dreams begins to hear beautiful, "utter" music. A dying person sees humanoid creatures standing at the doors of some buildings, from which strong light is reflected. Many people can hear unusual voices, they see powerful colored images, figures of people distinguished by luxury, light and psychic power.
Some of the dying see motionless figures of people with Mongolian features: they stand and watch a person die. Mortally ill people dream of wide landscapes, rocks, from the crevices of which streams of light emerge, they hear voices that seem to come from the depths of the earth. They see fortresses built in the mountains. Voices of some sort invite them to travel the stormy sea. “The closer death is, the more beautiful dreams become,” says C. G. Jung, “one gets the impression that some new life begins with these magnificent pictures: to achieve this life, the human body must perish”.
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It is curious that both in the works of C. G. Jung himself and other representatives of his "analytical" school, such descriptions are given, which are largely similar to the phenomena, much later, already in the 1970s, described in the works of researchers of clinical death …
So, for example, E. Epley, one of the representatives of the Jungian school, talks about a man who was in a dying crisis for 5 days in a row, but survived. After he regained consciousness, he said that these 5 days of his life were full of rows of beautiful images.
He saw himself on a narrow road that led him to the distant, wild and bluish-purple mountains. Jumping from one cliff to another, he again found himself in a green valley. Here, on the rivers flowing to the south, he saw ancient and high bridges. Suddenly he noticed that he was in the sea: the sun was approaching him, and he was standing at the bottom of the sea. Some earthly beautiful plants grow between him and the sun. Then he sees himself already on the seashore, in the waves of which huge fish appear: they, making wild movements, approach the dreamer. After that he is back in the valley.
From the cracks of the rocks, heads and faces are visible, even individual eyes look at him. In one tree, he sees the beautiful face of a deceased woman, as if it were made of marble. Then the eyewitness finds himself inside some high walls and sees that a Mongol is standing in the corner: he has a yellow-brown face, black and thick hair, large and sinister eyes. The Mongol disappears, after which the dreamer has a feeling that the eyes of some animals are looking at him. It seems to him that he is going crazy and shouts in fear: "Enough!" And immediately he sees himself in a beautiful hall, from the ceiling of which the "divine eye" looks at him. After these images disappear, the crisis is over.
There is no doubt that these experiences reflected not only some still incomprehensible forces, but also the religious and racial ideas of the dying and revived person.
Thus, the theme of death is expressed in dreams in the form of different images. The nature and associative connections of these images are influenced by the process of deterioration and improvement of human health, the beginning of the development of diseases in it. Studies have shown that, due to a general deterioration in health, a person, in addition to images of spoiled food, dirt, muddy waters and other similar things, often sees in a dream a cemetery, individual graves, corpses and other images that are somehow connected with the theme of death. Such dreams seem to notify that the body has begun to decompose and die.
CG Jung, in particular, was very interested in this type of dream.
He described the following tragic incident: an eight-year-old girl attached such great importance to her dreams that day after day she wrote them down and, at the age of 10, presented them to her father as a New Year's gift. My father was a psychiatrist. He was very worried that his daughter was having such dreams, but he could not interpret them. 7 dreams out of 10 in characteristic images described destruction and reconstruction, death and resurrection. The impression was that dreams were reporting some imminent catastrophe. Indeed, the girl died at the age of 12. As CG Jung said, her death cast its shadow back in time, on her life and dreams.
In dreams, the fear of death is most often experienced when dreamers suffer from heart disease. This circumstance was described for the first time in the 30s of the last century by the famous physician M. I. Astvatsaturov. He wrote that if a person begins a latent period in the development of heart disease, he has terrible, nightmares, because of which he wakes up. The fear of death appears in the dream.
However, different people, suffering from the same heart disease, experience fear in different dream situations, in front of different images. At least today it is already generally accepted that, even if all other symptoms are absent, only the experience of fear in dreams indicates a latent (hidden, latent) onset of the development of heart disease. When a person wakes up from such dreams, he already consciously experiences fear of possible death.
Let us give an example of the symbolization in a dream of thoughts concerning one's own death, which was reported to me by the relatives of a woman who died at the age of 83. About 2 months before her death, she had the following dream: a sister who died a few months ago appears and tells her: “I received a land plot and built a nice house. I'll build for you too. Come to me, we will live together."
After 2 months she had a stroke of the left hemisphere of the brain and right-sided paralysis of the body, and after 3 days she, suffering wordlessly, dies. They also say that on the eve of the day when the stroke occurred, remembering her deceased sister, she said: "I ask God for death in three days, so as not to suffer like my sister." And in fact, exactly three days passed from the moment of the stroke to death, while her sister suffered for a long time and died in agony. This dream and other facts testify to the belief of this woman in the afterlife, where, in her opinion, people also receive land plots and build houses.
It is possible to assume that a seriously ill person, consciously thinking about his imminent death, thereby supplies his subconscious with the material used to form dreams. And in dreams, as usual, each thought is presented mainly in the form of visual scenes and actions performed in them. And now dream images appear, which are interpreted as anticipations.
From this point of view, the dream of the talented Armenian poet Petros Duryan, who died in his youth, on January 21, 1872, is of interest. He saw the dream in question three days before his death, and in it he foresaw his death. It is said that he saw the following in a dream: three priests appear and invite him to the wedding. Already on his deathbed, smiling sadly, he explains the meaning of what he saw: this wedding will take place there, in heaven. Interestingly, three priests attended his funeral.
As we can see, anticipating his death, the poet also saw in his imagination his funeral, which, being symbolized, appeared in the dream in the form of a “heavenly wedding”. The dream, in which there was a prediction of the death of P. Duryan, was also seen by his brother Mihran.
Let's give another example of foreseeing death. A young woman of 30 years old, G. A., one day in April 1987 saw in a dream that her maternal grandmother (already deceased) was coming to their house. GA meets her at the entrance to the house, where she went down the stairs. The deceased says: “I am going to Aunt Lida” (this is the other daughter of the deceased). Grandma looked like she did in real life. At least at the entrance, in the semi-darkness, GA did not notice anything special or unusual about her. In her dream, G. A. had no doubt that her grandmother was alive.
After 2–3 days, GA learned that her aunt Lida was in the hospital and she was diagnosed with cancer, an incurable disease. She passed away a month later.
We can say that G. A. foresaw the death of her aunt. The late grandmother did not want to enter their house, she went to the one who was to die. GA claims that my grandmother died 8-9 years ago and in recent years she has never seen her in a dream. Only after her death did she see her several times in a dream and always in her apartment. Therefore, we can conclude that the unexpected appearance of grandmother in GA's dream had a special meaning: it foreshadowed the death of his aunt.
Finally, an interesting historical example, in which a person's foresight of his own death is combined with the foresight of his own death in the dream of another. Frank Edwards wrote: “… dreams often lead to surprising results - to events, the sequence of which coincides remarkably with the sequence of the dream. This dream sequence is so close in content to the actual event that the dream itself becomes, in essence, a prediction.
One morning in 1812, the Prime Minister of England, Spencer Perceval, told his family a dream that he dreamed at night and greatly disturbed him. In a dream, he was walking through the foyer of the House of Commons when he suddenly encountered a madman brandishing a pistol. The man was wearing a dark green coat with shiny copper buttons. Without warning, he pointed a pistol at the prime minister and fired. Then everything went dark in his eyes, which could mean, Perceval decided, that he had been killed.
An exceptionally strange incident also happened to Mr. John Williams, who had exactly the same dream as Spencer Perceval, but only 7 days earlier.
May 3, 1812 - Williams was at his estate in Redruth, Cornwall. He had little interest in politics, but that night he dreamed that he was in the cloakroom of the House of Commons when a small man in a dark green coat drew a pistol and shot another man in the chest. The man struck down by a bullet fell and soon died. When Williams asked who had been killed, he was told that Prime Minister Spencer Perceval had been shot.
When Williams woke up, he told his wife about a nightmare. Then he went to bed again and again had this terrible dream. Williams woke up again, but shortly before dawn, he dozed off and had an obsessive dream for the third time.
This excited him to such an extent that he told his friends everything. Shouldn't he go to London to warn the Prime Minister? Maybe send a letter and tell about the disturbing dream? Friends laughed that he attached such importance to nonsense, and Williams waved his hand and did nothing.
Williams had a dream three times on the night of May 3-4. Perceval saw the same dream from May 10-11. When the Prime Minister recounted his dream at home, everyone began to ask him not to attend the parliamentary session. But he felt that his presence in parliament was necessary and that his absence would be difficult to justify with such a trifle as a dream, albeit a disturbing one.
As Prime Minister Perceval walked through the foyer of the House of Commons on the morning of May 11, 1812, an unshaven man with disheveled hair, whom he had never seen before, came out from behind the column and shot him. The killer turned out to be a madman who imagined that he had serious claims against the government. He was wearing a dark green coat with shiny copper buttons."
This example, of course, also belongs to the category of parapsychological phenomena. Both Perceval himself and Williams somehow perceived in advance the thoughts and intentions of a mentally ill person who was about to commit murder. But how, by what mechanisms - it is difficult to say at the present time.
A. Nalchajyan