CHAPTER FOUR: DREAMS AND VISIONS OF DEATH
PARTICIPATORY DREAM WORK

In this and the following two charters the relation between death and participatory selfhood is explored in terms of dreams and visions. Since terminal illness and bereavement usually come under medical management, dreams and visions are often dismissed by health-care givers as hallucinations or delusions. Such interpretations are philosophical judgments that exceed the boundaries of medicine and need to be challenged.

To clarify these issues the respective terms should be defined. Hallucinations are a discharge of sensory material from within the central nervous system that does not cohere with the objective socio-physical environment. One who hallucinates seems confused and incoherent. Hallucinations may be caused by bodily traumas, high fever, poison, or medications. The basic characteristic of hallucinations is that they do not change the person's life or attitude. One remains the same before and after hallucinating, namely, with impaired reality testing.

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A vision is an experience in which symbolic content enters the mind from a side source, whether unconscious or transcendent. The most distinctive traits are a mandate, such as a summons or a calling, and consequently, profound changes in the personality (Benz 1968, 10-11):

The mandate is self-evident and self-authenticating. To a certain extent, a vision resembles a dream; however, the dream presents indirect or symbolic forms that require interpretation.

Generally, in the history of religions little dreams are distinguished from big dreams. The former express content entirely within the dreamer's personal experience, but the latter are exclusively symbolic, containing ancestral models and/or archetypes from within traditional religions and mythologies. Big dreams are like visions, and, in the history of religions, they are paired with each other. However, dreams come during sleep while visions could appear in sleep, in waking consciousness, or upon awakening. Furthermore, a vision could bring a separation from the body, otherworld journey, and ecstasy. Thus, the vision would exemplify an expansive, participatory mode of thought in opposition to the body, as Szondi would say.

The visionary is grasped by ultimate reality, which makes the mandate compelling. Visionary material may be imaginal, visual, or auditory. Historically, mystics have tried to go beyond sensory visions to image-less states of pure being or nothingness. Since some visions impart pure experience, it is difficult to define them exclusively as projections of the unconscious. When symbolism is present, surely the unconscious plays the same role in the vision; and the law of participation, formulated by Szondi, provides a comprehensive framework. When the visionary is grasped by ultimate reality, he or she is simultaneously

driven toward participation in fundamental reality. Sensory modes, even conscious and unconscious, may be regarded as phases along the way to pontifical selfhood and its functional characteristics of participation, integration, and transcendence.

Closely related to the vision is the apparition, defined as a spontaneous breakthrough from a transpersonal source into a the natural world, while the latter remains unchanged and correlated with personal consciousness (Dinzelbacher 1978, 117). When beholding an apparition, one does not separate from the body. An apparition resembles a vision in the sense that it may come to waking consciousness and deliver a mandate. However, unlike the vision, an apparition may be seen by more than one person and have an objective quality, spatial form, or

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mass without matter. An apparition may move, vibrate, or radiate energy in morphic fields. Like the dream and vision, an apparition conforms to the law of participation and presents a narrative framework as complementary to organic and interpersonal dimensions. Apparition, dream, and vision all bear co-acting transpersonal and unconscious functions as well.

Furthermore, apparition, dream, and vision may involve a synchronicity, a phenomenon emphasized by Jungian psychology. Jung defines synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence of two or more psychic or physical events, which are separated in space and cannot be explained by causal interaction (1960, 441). The simultaneous and meaningful coming together of distant events is governed by an archetype. Under the impact of synchronicity, the psyche is relativized. The three dimensional, spatio-temporal, causal world is temporarily, suspended, as the connective unconscious realizes a purposive unity. Since the Jungian definition of the psyche is deficient, with respect to the  family, it is necessary to add that the ancestry may also inform a synchronicity. Both ancestral and archetypal forms share translocal and transcausal exchanges within the unconscious.

All of the foregoing phenomena may be viewed in terms of Szondi's participatory theory of dreams. Szondi defines the dream as a nocturnal search for a oneness, likeness, and relatedness between waking consciousness or foreground and the hidden, unconscious background (1956,466). Achieving such a unity obtains an "autogenic participation. "The uniqueness of this participation is that the dream exceeds the boundaries of the spatio-temporal, causal world, penetrating the "beyond" in the sense of an unconscious "split-off" phase. Such a "split-off" phase, however, is not delusory but participatory.

To a certain extent, Szondi's dream theory resembles Jung's. Jung grounds his dream theory in the concept of compensation. The dream compensates the perspective of consciousness. When the consciousness becomes too one-sided, the dream automatically compensates through the elemental forces of the archetypes. Compensation compares to the automatic swinging of a pendulum or to the self-regulating forces of nature. Just as nature balances itself, so does the dream. Dreaming belongs to nature; it is trustworthy and not deceitful.

Szondi founds his theory upon the concept of complementarity. He would agree with Freud that dreams reflect causes from the past and with Jung that they forecast the future or manifest finality, but he would

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contend that the motor force of dreaming is the primal drive for participation. The complementary parts of the dream are the waking or foreground self (Vorder-Ich) and the latent, hidden, or background self (Hinter-Ich), which contains repressed, instinctual drives and hereditary material. Each self complements the other, and each revolves with the other. These rotating phases are consistent with the functions of threshold genes and with dominance variability.

Dreams may be analyzed in terms of four dramatic phases (Szondi 1956,487-489).

(1) The waking ego prepares for a journey by exploring various existential possibilities. This preparation takes place at the beginning of the dream cycle. (2) The waking ego surpasses a threshold, becoming hypnagogic, and descends into a deeper, symbolic background. As an example, One goes through a tunnel or across a bridge; or One sinks into a depth or into a whirlpool.

(3) At a profound level awareness becomes purely symbolic; this is the dream world, as such. The waking ego withdraws from the scene, becomes a passive spectator, and watches the action unfold on the stage; out of the unconscious, the personal, familial, and/or connective figures step forth. Frequently, ancestral models are presented, so that one receives a freedom of choice and is able to choose more than one existential possibility.

(4) Finally, the self becomes hypnopompic. The waking ego comes out from the background into center stage, and then the dreamer awakens. Symbolically, one goes up a staircase, or returns from a trip to one's family or place of work.

By describing these phases dramatically, as though they were four acts of a play, Szondi produces a narrative structure. Within the dramatic narrative the second and fourth phases are pivotal; for they signify two thresholds, respectively, in which the waking ego transcends itself. Whereas in Jung's theory such phases would only compensate for the extremes of consciousness, in Szondi's a basic decision-making role of the dream is uncovered. Choices are posed with respect to existential possibilities which the dreamer may be affirming and those which may be hidden or repressed. Since dreamers often neglect or forget material from the threshold phases, dream interpretation frequently fails to clarify the decision-making possibilities of the dream.

The narrative structure of Szondi's theory also complements the internal rhythms of creativity that emerge in the dream stages of sleep. It is well-known that sleep goes through ninety minute cycles of the night. Expressed by rapid-eye movements, dreaming may be as short as ten minutes or as long as one or two hours. Unlike deep sleep which

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lacks rapid-eye movements, dreaming is one form of seizure activity, as Frederic Myers knew so long ago. Dreaming is, according to the new scientific studies, "the conscious experience of a normal nocturnal brain seizure which helps the brain avoid the excessive excitability that plagues epilepsy victims even during the waking state" (Hobson 1988, 176). This relationship with epilepsy reveals alternating phases of neural activities, one dominant and one recessive. These patterns demonstrate that the brain sustains wave-like, undulating rhythms in itself. Dreaming takes place when the paroxysmal, reticular neurons dominate and escape the inhibitory aminergic neurons (ibid, 184). Switching on and off the polar paroxysmal and inhibitory functions starts in the brain stem and is mediated by a functional disinhibition. Thus, every dreamer is a latent epileptic.

The imagery of dream sleep is volitional, creative, and adaptive. Dreaming discharges intense emotion, which is channeled by instinctual drives and genetic information encoded in the animal brain. These functional aspects are consolidated by symbolism, through which the primal drive for participation achieves a unity of self. Dreams, visions, and apparitions deliver a narrative framework to the drive for participation, even in the face of death.

II. DREAMS AND TERMINAL CANCER

According to classical psychoanalytic doctrine, dreams of the dying tend to be - simple fulfillments of childhood desires, based upon regression, and aimed toward a denial of death. This approach presupposes Freud' s influential opinion that the unconscious lacks knowledge of death and has neither contradiction nor negation (S.E.XIV, 1957a, 296). For Freud the unconscious believes in its own immortality. In contrast, subsequent clinical work has revealed that regressive wish-fulfilling dreams exist independently of a denial of death and belief in immortality (Norton 1963). Phases of denial, depression, and heightened narcissism belong to the grieving process, which includes unconscious and/or conscious knowledge of death.

More recently, dreams of fourteen terminally ill cancer patients were compared with those of healthy, elderly persons. Despite a conscious denial of death, the dreams of the cancer patients revealed an unconscious knowledge of death (Coolidge and Fish 1983-1984). Along

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with themes of death, the dreams of the cancer patients expressed fear and loneliness, indicating the discharge of emotion.

Emotions relate to aggression, which, the authors find, occurs in 50 % of the dreams of cancer patients. They theorize that the projection of aggression in dreams reflects the dreamer's attitude toward dying. When the dreamer is the object, then death is the aggressor; but when, \the dreamer is the subject, then aggression displaces anger or rage against death by falling onto other characters. Other persons in the dream are usually members of one's own family. Projecting death onto another character implies the dreamer's own ambivalence toward dying.

The authors conclude that death dreams are attempts to integrate the unconscious knowledge of death with consciousness. This conclusion is sound, and it reveals the knowledge of death to be a threshold function. The dreams discharge paroxysmal aggression in an attempt to bring the unconscious fear and loneliness in the face of one's death across the threshold of consciousness.

In another study Charles Garfield reports his work with 215 terminal cancer patients over a three year span. He discovers his patients to have ambivalence, increasing weakness, and an "altered state of consciousness" just before death. The idea of "altered state" is not defined, but it represents the time when dreams and visions are active. Garfield describes the following symbolic patterns of dreams and visions:

(1) real and radiant encounters of light, celestial music, deceased and religious figures; (2) clear and demonic, nightmarish imagery; (3) alternating blissful and terrifying dream-like images; and (4) the void and/or the tunnel (1979, 54).

Garfield mentions that his patients suffer severe chemo-therapeutic and radiological toxins, but he does not explain how these correlate with the dreams and visions. Neither he nor the authors cited above discuss medical factors, such as fever, pain, or medications as variables. Are the dreams and visions products of or defenses against pain? In the absence of an answer in their studies, I would go on and say no, because dreams and visions tend to diminish pain. The reason is that the pain threshold is not reducible to physical sensations but varies with respect to situationaI factors and religious or culturaI meaning (Blumer 1975, 871-872).

In summary, these studies of cancer patients' dreams yield significant conclusions:

(1) The intent of death dreams and visions is to integrate the foreground and background selves with knowledge of impending

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death.

(2) Radiance and creativity signify integration. (3) Demonic and threatening images represent a failure to achieve integration, a failure to surpass the threshold of consciousness, by not resolving conflict, ambivalence, or hostility. (4) The void and tunnel suggest lack of integration due to helplessness, despair, or depression.

III. ARCHETYPAL DEATH VISIONS

Jung emphasizes that the symptoms of dying operate in the unconscious long before death and that the purpose of the psyche is to prepare consciousness for impending death through dreams and visions (1960, 411). Jung's view opposes Freud's belief that the unconscious lacks a knowledge of death. Jung maintains that the unconscious is both aware of death and a life after death. When a natural terminal process sets in, the unconscious symbolizes death as a journey. Aniela Jaffe explains that her father had been an invalid for a long time as the result of an accident. When at last the time came for him to die, he said to my dear mother and to relatives at midday that he was going home by the night train at half-past-twelve. And he died to the very minute.. ..(1963, 413)

She goes on to say the image of fareweIl is related to that of the journey and that it usually brings a melancholic serenity to the survivors. She illustrates with a dream of the deceased in a forest:

I called out a cheerful greeting to him. My brother-in-Iaw smiled and waved back, but when we were about ten yards from each other, he turned down another path, smiled at me again and once more waved his hand. As I had not seen my brother-in-Iaw for years, I was quite taken aback and woke up. The dream was so vivid that I lay awake for hours thinking about it. On the following day I received, to my great sorrow, the news of my brother-in-Iaw's sudden death (1963, 43).

A more comprehensive example of the Jungian method is Jane Wheelwright's portrayaI of the last six months of the life of a terminal cancer patient named Sally (1981). The patient is 37 years old, married,

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and a mother of two children. She had contracted breast, ovarian, and bone cancer, and her primary treatment consisted of surgery and chemotherapy. Formerly attractive and extroverted, Sally had become emaciated with pain by the time Wheelwright met her.

Sally continually rages against her husband Jim, and she is frequentIy depressed and self-deprecating. She wants to die but remains ambivalent about it. Sally admits: "Sometimes I dream of a white boat gliding across the water. It's death coming for me. I want to get on that boat and at the same time I don't want to" (22). The ambivalence about her impending death makes her depressed, but she reacts with increased activity. Wheelwright cautions Sally that her activism blocks messages from the unconscious (23).

Early in the therapy Sally has a big dream:

I came upon a Sumerian Tower with great ramps zig-zagging to the top. It was also Southern California State College overlooking the University of Southern California. I had to climb to the top; it was a horrifying ordeal. When I got there I looked below, and throughout the city I saw buildings from the Sumerian, Romanesque, Gothic, and ancient Indian eras. There was a large, elegant book lying open before me. It was handsomely illustrated with architectural details of these buildings, of their friezes and sculptures. I awakened, terrorized by the height of the tower (28).

In Wheelwright's view, the dream conveys a pent-up need of the unconscious to speak from Sally's center, which touches the streams of humanity. The mountain symbolizes aspiration; the tower is the nucleus of herseIf; and the city the sphere of herself. The book suggests a need for knowledge. Ascent to the tower equals descent to the unconscious. The terror of the pinnade of her ascent means that the Self seeks change, but the ego wants to cling. Shortly thereafter, Sally dreams of driving along the edge of the ocean in a station wagon. It was a beautifuI scene at dusk. I heard a meow coming from the back seat, and when I turned around I saw a tiny kitten. It looked just like Cyrano, our cat; it was exactIy the same type and color. I wondered if I could persuade Jim to let me keep it (36).

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Wheelwright interprets this ocean dream as a compensation for the tower dream. Whereas the tower dream expresses Sally's dominating rationaI personality, the ocean dream brings out the kitten which represents feminine, instinctual nature. Sally learns that whoever is cut off from her instinctual nature becomes vulnerable to disease. The kitten also represents an instinct to flee death.

During one of Jim's absences, Sally dreams of being on a beach beside a body of water:

I had to cross this bay on a surf board that was like a raft; I had to paddle it with my hands the way surfers do. It was a huge ordeal, a supreme effort, but somehow I managed to get across. When I arrived on the other shore, I felt relieved and triumphant. Jim met me there and toId me he appreciated what I had done, but that for some reason beyond his controI I had to go back (93).

Sally awakens before knowing whether or not she had returned from the other shore. At the personal level the dream dramatizes the conflict with her husband; she is sent back because he knows she will die. More profoundly, the dream shows the need to reunite with her husband and to discover her true female selfhood (156).

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At last, Sally enters a hospital, and Jim still has not visited her. Nightly, she screams: "Mother, Mother" (192). She dreams of being persecuted by Nazi terror and of arid soil and barren land. These two images convey victimization and depression, respectively. Sally complains of guilt for getting cancer: "You feel as though you're being punished for some horrendous crime you committed, yet you don't know what the crime was" (200). Consequently, Sally becomes obsessed with evil and at the same time, she seems to exist in a dark tunnel.

Wheelwright says that tunnels appear in dreams of people who feel stuck, who do not know where they are going. She insists that Sally must accept the dark tunnel within her. For this evil is the dark side of God, and the darkness sends cancer and death. Yet Sally cannot accept the darkness within her nor understand how darkness produces light and evil good. In this struggle she fears being unable to breath, which is the same as the fear of death (260).  Sally reports her last dream shortly before her death: "I was a palm free, the middle one of three trees. An earthquake was about to occur that would destroy all life, and I didn't want to be killed by the quake" (269). Wheelwright associates the palm tree with the Sumerian Tower of Sally's first big dream. She is correct in the sense that Assyrian tablets of 800 B.c.E. identify the palm tree with the tree of life. In the Jungian perspective of this case the tree symbolizes the union of male and female, so that Sally has become the mother "who gives life and lays it to rest" (270). As a palm tree, Sally has returned to the regenerative unconscious, from which she had come.

Wheelwright points out that the earthquake would be the cancer, which Sally fears will destroy her house, e.i. her body. Ironically, Sally died by pneumonia; therefore, she escaped the earthquake she feared so much. However, her unconscious had actually prepared her for death by bringing her close to the earthquake archetype.

Finally, Jane Wheelwright's sensitive account of Sally's death clearly illumines the symbolism of terminal cancer, but I believe the analysis conceals or misses vital material. By assigning priority to the archetypes, the Jungian analyst is inclined to omit instinctual drive needs and tendencies. To conclude this section I sketch a tentative reinterpretation, based upon the paroxysmal-participatory pattern. Through the

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tower dream Sally strives for participation in social and metaphysical reality. This need belongs to the ego, but it is activated by the cancer as a life-threatening event. The need for expansion is offset by the tendency to cling to the past which also originates in the cancer. The impulse to cling promotes depression and ambivalence.

When Sally dreams of going to the ocean, she reveals a need for healing and restitution. The ocean may be viewed as the connective unconscious, but it does not so much compensate the tower dream, as Wheelwright says, but complements it. Descent is a paroxysmal equivalent of ascent; both symbolize shock events.

Arriving at the distant shore, in the surfboard dream, suggests a momentary state of integration. It is only a potential state, since Sally must return to this shore, to the ordinary world because of her husband' s command. He is the condition for her attaining wholeness; and unless the marital conflict is resolved, Sally's striving for participation will be blocked. Healing is not dependent on the interpretation of dreams but on the resolution of unconscious conflict in the marriage.

The crucial insight is that Sally conceals pent-up emotion. The therapeutic task is to release her rage and seek forgiveness. It is not to unite opposites but to make restitution of the marital resentments. To interpret emotional explosions as collisions of opposites, as the Jungian does, is to miss the hidden paroxysmality. Volcanic eruptions symbolize the discharge of crude emotions and a need for restitution. Sally's experience demonstrates that suppressed anger is a symptom of the cancer experience.

Consequently, the earthquake in the last dream is the eruption of crude Cain affect. Her fear of being killed by the earthquake shows a need for restitution, a need which has not been satisfied. Sally's ascent to the mountain, in the tower dream, expresses Sally's need for ego expansion, for exaltation of her power of being.Through the

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becoming a palm tree is actually a defense against the volcanic eruption. Although Wheelwright is certainly correct in linking the palm tree with a union of opposites, in ancient Mesopotamia such a union was reserved for the gods and not humans. Since Sally is human and not divine, her palm tree becomes a sign of death, a failure to achieve an exalted power of being. Historically, the palm tree has evolved through Hebrew­ Christian civilization as the "dry tree," which is a symbol of death (Peebles 1923, 78). Without resolving her rage and experiencing forgiveness, Sally's drive for participation in social and metaphysical reality turns into a tragedy.

IV. FAMILIAL DEATH VISIONS

Leopold Szondi contributed to modern thought the notion of a distinctly ancestral or familial dream. The breakthrough came in l916, when Szondi was a 23 year old medical student and serving as a medic in the Austro-Hungarian army. After being wounded in combat, he went to Vienna for convalescence, and there he fell in love with a language teacher, who was a blonde, of Saxon and Aryan descent. He recalls:

One night I awoke from a dream, in which my parents discussed the sad destiny of my eldest half-brother. He had studied medicine in Vienna more than 30 years before me, and he had also fallen in love with a language teacher, who was even of blonde, Saxon, and Aryan descent. He had to marry her and give up the medical exam. His marriage was not happy (Szondi 1963, 525).

Through this ancestral dream Szondi realized that he was repeating a familial fate pattern. Instead, he wanted to live his own life; so on the next morning he left Vienna and returned to his regiment.

In the course of his later medical practice, Szondi came to understand that images of the ancestors occupy the familial unconscious, and they become manifest in dreams. The ancestral dream corresponds to the genetic fact that the goal of forbearers is to survive in the lives of their descendants (Szondi 1963, 79-81). As a therapist, Szondi was concerned to help the patients work through hereditary disorders that were displayed in dreams, because these had a bearing upon the decision-making of the individual.

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Otherwise, the most accessible source is the evidence initially compiled in the nineteenth century by the British Society for Psychical Research. Although Frederic Myers began to document familial dreams, another member of the society went on to publish a connection of death­bed visions. William Barrett, Professor of Physics in Dublin, published his material in 1926, and his work was subsequently reissued (1986). Barrett provides a helpful classification of different kinds of visions.

He describes what should be called apparitions of deceased relatives and friends by those who are dying. In some cases the dying had already known of the death, and, in others, they learned of the death while they are dying. Whether their death were known or not, when beholding a deceased relative, one tends to brighten up with joy and ecstasy. The following example has been carefully and critically witnessed by a nurse:

I recall the death of a woman (Mrs. Brown, aged 36) who was the victim of that most dreadful disease, malignant cancer. Her sufferings were excruciating, and she played earnestly that death might speedily come to her and end her agony. Suddenly her sufferings appeared to cease; the expression of her face, which a moment before bad been distorted by pain, changed to one of radiant joy. Gazing upwards, with a glad light in her eyes, she raised her hands and exclaimed, "Oh, mother dear, you have come to take me home, I am so glad." And in another moment her physical life had ceased (29).

A familial apparition may disclose the fact that a loved one has attained forgiveness in death:

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The dying man… .suddenly looked up, opened his eyes wide, and looking at the side of the bed opposite to where his wife was, exclaimed, "Why, Mother, here is Tom [recently deceased son], and he is all right, no marks on him [from a fatal railway accident]. Oh, he looks fine." Then after another silence he said, "And here's Nance too." A pause, then "Mother, she is all right, she has been forgiven" (50).

Barrett explains that the man could die after learning of the forgiveness of his daughter. She had given birth to a child out of wedlock and died, after which the baby was born.  She had no time to repent.

Barrett records several cases featuring what Frederic Myers called "travelling clairvoyance," in which the dying behold living persons at a distance and, occasionally, they share reciprocal visions. For example, a woman is terminally ill but says she cannot die, until she sees her children who live in another city. This happens, and then after ten minutes, she announces: "I am ready now; I have been with my children" (83). Barrett points out that when notes taken at the place of death and of the children' s residence were compared, the day, hour, and minute were the same.

Barrett's cases demonstrate an acceleration and expansion of thought at the brink of death. The mind becomes more alert and aware. Such enhanced mental activity occurs clearly in the case of Jack, a deaf mute, who is dying with rheumatic fever. His hands and fingers are so swollen that he cannot gesture, but, white lying on his back, suddenly his face lighted up with the brightest of smiles. After a little while Jack awoke and used the words "heaven" and "beautiful" as well as he could by means of his lips and facial expression. As he became more conscious he also told us in the same manner that his brother Tom and his sister Harriet were coming to see him (100).

Since they lived in a distant city, this knowledge had to come from his clairvoyance. After Jack's partial recovery, "he told us that he had been allowed to see into Heaven and to hear most beautiful music." Barrett does not develop a general theory of death-bed visions, but he points to a "transcendental self of the subject independent of the

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fundamental units of the physical world-matter, time, and space" (169). The transcendental self emerges in the face of death and achieves a psychic relatedness with other selves, whether living or dead, by means of telepathy. Within a transcendental relatedness the space-time, causal world of the living is relativized. Barrett's brief description of the transcendental self is virtually identical to Myers' subliminal self and Jung's Self, and similar to Szondi's Pontifical selfhood.

V. "TAKE-AWAY" VISIONS

Barrett's seminal study remained unexamined for about fifty years, until Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson published an influential study of death-bed visions (1977). On the basis of one thousand terminal  patients in the United States and India, they found death-bed visions to be authentic and meaningful factors in dying. One of their major concerns was to distinguish visions from hallucinations. Hallucinations are produced by the sick brain as defenses against stressors. Brain disease, uremic poisoning, 103 F.  temperature, and drugs are specific causes of hallucinations. Sensory content of hallucinations tends to be this worldly, unclear, and variable.

In contrast, visions manifest a clear and coherent consciousness, "otherworldly" content obtained by telepathy or clairvoyance, which is consistently uniform. Although visions may mix occasionally with hallucinations, they are fundamentally independent of physiological and pathological processes. While the authors' definitions are conceptually consistent; their argument is flawed by frequently interchanging terms of hallucinations and apparitions.

Nevertheless, they observe that most visions last a short time, whether five, 15, or 30 minutes (61). After the vision ends, the patient dies relatively quickly, usually within an hour or two. The closer to the time of death the vision is, the more likely it will reveal otherworld quality. Primary contents are living persons, the dead, and mythic or religious figures. About half of all visions have a "take-away" function, in which deceased relatives arrive to escort the patient to another world (67).

Normally, dying patients respond positively to the escorts. Their faces brighten up, and they become elated or transfigured. Momentary fear, anxiety, or depression may be felt, but these tend to be transitory. The "take-away" quality is the mandate that causes the mood elevation

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of the patient. Visions are distributed equally among males and females, young and old, educated and uneducated. Higher education may enhance understanding of the vision, but it is not the cause. Similarly, a prior belief in life after death may be a contributing factor but not the cause of the vision Osis and Haraldsson contend that the terminal patient's, positive  affects come from a clear, coherent grasp of a real other world (80). Otherworldly states have an intentionality irreducible to patients' needs and desires. The authors also concede that the mind loosens or dissociates from the body in the face of death (128, 131). They draw an analogy of dissociation from schizophrenia, but in light of Frederic Myers' work and Dostoevsky's experience a better analogy for mental dissociation at death would be epilepsy, in which ecstatic joy is experienced. Nevertheless, the argument of Osis and Haraldsson clearly deviates from that of psychoanalysis, according to which elation comes from regression to the pleasure principle, from a temporary suspension of the reality principle, and from a return to infantile .omnipotence. In contrast, Osis and Haraldsson maintain that the joy of the "take-away" visions derives from an otherworld beyond the reality principle.

VI. ASSESSMENT OF VISIONS

In current discussions, Robert Kastenbaum offers a critique of death­ bed visions in his text-book (1991, 324-325). He charges that the research mode of the Osis and Haraldsson study is impaired by its retrospective approach. Data were actually recollections gathered by health care-givers, who lacked training in research methods. Some of their recollections went back many years and might have become vague or unreliable. Some of the witnesses even disagreed with one another and, therefore, were too subjective. Kastenbaum emphasizes the personal needs of the patient. Since dying patients tend to deny their own deaths, it is difficult for them to attain acceptance. As biological creatures concerned with survival, humans cope with death by needs and projections. On the one hand, we deny death; and, on the other, we project the survival of death in the form of a desired immortality. Impending death creates a splitting within the patient. Part of the self denies death, while another part of the self communicates a fantasy of survival by means of desire. Hence, desire for immortality arises from the pleasure principle with its defense against

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a real threat of death. Kastenbaum's argument presupposes Freud's opinion that the unconscious knows no death and his conception of the brain as a closed physical system. Kastenbaum's argument also exemplifies the "split-off" phase, a stage of terminal illness recognized by psychoanalysis. Esther Dreifuss-­Kattan defines the "split-off' phase:

Two opposite ideas are verbalized: one, a full realization of the closeness of death; the other, a faith in surviving, often expressed in vivid fantasies about the future. The perception of this split and the

psychological handling of it is, for those surrounding the patient, extremely difficult, since the split stands in opposition to the reality principle that governs our ordinary, day-to-day existence,... (1990, 102).

Dreifuss-Kattan contends that the suspension of the reality principle activates the timeless mother-child union and its rich fantasy' sources. The "split-off" phase is irrational but not psychotic, because the dying patient acquires a heightened awareness, while ego functions remain intact. Evidence of the nonpsychotic character of the "splitting" appears in writings or drawings produced by terminal cancer patients. Such works embody creative fantasies that offer hope as forms of reparation. Creativity nullifies the negative effects of disease, such as pain, and draws out symbolic images from the unconscious. Symbolism makes restitution and strives for healing in the dying process.

The combined arguments of Kastenbaum and Dreifuss-Kattan are compelling and clinicaIly sound. Certainly, the "split-off" phase comes amid the stage of visionary activity in terminal illness. However, the "split-off" phase has been interpreted differently by Jungian psychology. It is acknowledged when a patient becomes withdrawn and demoralized, or seems far-away and detached, as though no human relationship had any more meaning. The "split-off" phase means the cessation of the wishing and fearing ego as well as the breakthrough of a spiritual consciousness (von Franz 1987,111, 116-117). The spiritual consciousness represents the Self, which transcends time, space, causality, and survives bodily death. Reparative processes of terminal illness are also breakthroughs of the timeless realm of the psyche. The Jungian interpretation has the virtue of recognizing a positive transcendental function rather than a regression.

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Having reviewed the clinical context of death-bed visions, it is necessary to discuss an evaluation. First, the Osis and Haraldsson study is, admittedly, retrospective and subjective, as Kastenbaum insists. However, when reading the vision literature as a whole, this objection cannot be maintained; for data on death-bed visions have been carefully collected and rigorously analyzed, particularly by the British scholars in the nineteenth century. Methodologies employed by Myers, Barrett and their colleagues Calle from the so-called "hard" sciences. Eye-witness accounts were verified, making the body of literature as a whole reliable. Ironically, Kastenbaum confesses that he has witnessed several death-bed visions, and he continues to wonder (1991, 325). His admission implies that death-bed visions are dramatic, overpowering, and not easily forgotten. To ensure accuracy witnesses should simply record or write out what is occurring.

Second, the purported need to deny death for the sake of survival may be challenged in light of evolutionary genotropism. As defined in charter two, genotropism is a reciprocal attraction between carriers of the same or related genes. This means that relatives share higher concentrations of identical or related genes compared to general populations. The reason for such genetic clustering is that genes promote their own survival by creating reciprocal attraction between carriers. Organisms have the tendency to select similar or identical genetic types, whether genealogically related or not. Gene relatedness is a fundamental fact of evolving nature, and it precedes phenotypic traits '\ of appearance, face, and class.

Genotropism illumines a basic fact that serves as a cornerstone of the theory of natural selection, namely, the experience of altruism. Within the animal kingdom animals allow themselves to die on behalf of a relative or offspring, and they expose themselves to mortal danger in defense against territorial intruders (Smith 1964). For example, a parent animal may give up food for an offspring, when resources are scarce.

Birds engage in apparent "suicide" attack behavior toward a territorial intruder, who threatens the family nest during the breeding season. While the parent animal might die, at least half of the genes survive in the descendant's gene pool. For the same reason, when a human dies in order to save family members, copies of one's own or related genes will survive (Dawkins 1976, 97).

A corresponding willingness to die among humans occurs in the clinical pattern called "predilection to death," involving persons who

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know they are dying and may even predict the time of death accurately. They look forward to a reunion of familial relationships in death and, consequently, feel neither grief nor fear (Weisman and Hackett 1961). predilection cases should not be confused with "Voodoo" death or with suicide, which involve lethality and tools. Predilection to death is a natural willingness to die, motivated by the needs to escape unmanageable pain and to resume a love relationship in death.

Within the history of religions the predilection to die correlates with the "dying at will," as practiced in Hawaii and other Pacific cultures (Sato 1964, Cooke 1976). One dies intentionally and naturally, without starvation, tools, or disease. Dying at will is done mainly by older Hawaiians, who maintain the beliefs of the traditional ancestral religion and who claim that non-Hawaiians are unable to perform it. One version of the "dying at will" is the Hawaiian "take my life instead" ritual. When one is seriously ill, another member of the family prays to die instead and does die. Normally, it is a child who suffers a life­ threatening illness, and an older relative dies in his or her place. One Hawaiian scholar relates that "her nephew was awfully sick, and my great-grandmother chose to die that he might live. He lived. She died" (Pukui 1972, 134).

Dying often coincides with a vision of an ancestor, most frequently a grandparent or grandchild. Records of visions are kept at Queen Liliuokalani Children' s Center in Honolulu, and one typical example follows: "TuTu sat up in bed and said, 'Look! the relatives [Aumakua] are waiting for me!' and then she was gone" (ibid, 13).

In traditional Hawaiian religion the ancestors belong to four broad groups of descent, each one correlated with a primal element: Pele, goddess of the volcano (fire); thunder and lightning (air); sharks (water); and turtlesand lizards (earth). When received by the ancestors, the dying patient is transfigured in an appropriate manner (Kamakau 1964, 64-65). For example, descendants of Pele envision columns of fire. These lines of familial descent are designated by paroxysmal symbols, implying that familial relatedness copes with the shock suffering of death.

Altogether, the combined evidence of dying at will, predilection to death, and biological altruism suggests that genotropism operates in death. The natural willingness to die is motivated by an unconscious, genotropic attraction to close family members.

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Third, it is surely correct to emphasize as Kastenbaum does, that dying patients face death in terms of a need. Psychoanalysis assigns biological priority to the sexual drive, and since it ceases at death, then death must be denied. My question is: What need takes priority in terminal illness? As stated above, preservation of the individual organism is not absolute in evolution, since in times of mortal danger altruism compels a willingness to die. This fact conforms to the paroxysmal pattern rather than the sexual drive. Terminal illness activates the paroxysmal pattern in defense against the onset of death. This defense takes shape through dreams and visions, through the symbolism of air, earth, fire, and water, and through the acceleration of the psyche. Following the psychiatric study of epilepsy, paroxysmality must be distinguished from sexuality.

The root need of the paroxysmal pattern is that of atonement . (inverse by lb). The intent of accelerating thought at the brink of death is to make restitution as a condition of wholeness. Once the restitution need is satisfied, one opens up to a transcendent dimension and seeks to strip away the body. Going beyond the body fulfills the primal drive for metaphysical participation in fundamental reality. This paroxysmal-participatory mode usually rotates into the dying person's foreground as a "split-off' phase.

Traditional Hawaiian religion provides a clear illustration of the paroxysmal-participatory phase of dying. One turns toward the ancestors who dwell in the eternal. There is a sea of time, so vast man cannot know its boundaries, so fathomless man cannot plumb its depths. Into this dark sea plunge the spirits of men, released from their earthly bodies. The sea becomes one with the sky and the land and the fiery surgings that rise from deep in the restless earth. For this is the measureless expanse of all space. This is the timelessness of all time. This is eternity (Pukui 1972, 35).

The island represents the waking ego, the ancestors the familial unconscious, and the ocean the collective unconsciousness. Freely joining the ancestors transfigures the dead and relativizes the oceanic horizon into the eternaI.

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CHAPTER FIVE: DREAMS AND VISIONS OF GRIEF

I. IMAGERY AND GRIEF WORK

Frederic Myers observed that dreams and visions appear to bereaved survivors for one year after a death, and he justified this observation by grounding dreams and visions in the veridical afterimage.

(Hughes describes “veridical afterimage” on page 10 as:

“Visions of the dead are called phantasms and are defined as a manifestation of  persistent personal energy," that is, a residue of one's personality when alive. The residue is an afterimage, to which Myers attaches the adjective veridical. (in Swedish = sann-färdig, trovärdig; sandröm. LB). By “veridical afterimage” Myers means a real but nonmaterial form, left over after one's death. It is carried by telepathy from the deceased being to the living person, who encounters it unconsciously through a nonpathological dissociation of consciousness. Veridical afterimages seem to erupt like waves from the depth of the subliminal self.”)

Myers' contention accords well with mourning even though he did not conceptualize the grieving process as such. When grief became understood clinically in the twentieth century, dreams and. visions were relatively neglected. The principal theoretical reason was that in "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) Sigmund Freud formulated grief primarily as a process of separation from the deceased (1959 C.P.IV). Attention to dreams and visions might inhibit the necessary process of detachment; for according to psychoanalysis they exhibit a failure of reality testing and infantile regression. In psychoanalysis the imagery of dreams and visions is a hallucinatory retention of the lost object. Essentially, grief is a personal response to the loss of a dependent or interdependent relationship. Despite Freud's pioneering insight, the principal theorist of grief in the twentieth century is Erich Lindemann, whose classic study of survivors of the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston established the definitions of acute normal, delayed, and abnormal grief  (1944).   Basic to acute grief is a common syndrome, comprising bodily distress, specifically, "waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time," along with tightness in the throat, choking, difficulties in breathing, need for sighing, feeling of emptiness, powerlessness, and mental tension or pain (141-142). These bodily symptoms co-exist with

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guilt, hostility, loss of behavioral patterns, identification with traits of the deceased, and preoccupation with a mental image of the deceased.

Lindemann points out that a morbid reaction could take place, if the mental image were to replace grieving by the deceased, whose senses would be altered by the shock of death. "There is commonly a slight sense of unreality, a feeling of increased emotional distance from other people (sometimes they appear shadowy or small), and there is intense preoccupation with the image of the deceased" (142). The latter is "a vivid visual image of his presence," in the words of one widow (143). At the same time, the bereaved displays increased activity, mobility, and speech; but these are not necessarily well-organized or goal-directed. These characteristics are expected to appear during the first seven or ten days after the death, which is the period of the most intense grief.

After this initial intensity of grief diminishes somewhat, the bereaved faces a series of tasks, known as grief work. Generalizing on Lindemann's papers, grief work consists of (1) real acceptance of the actual fact of death; (2) feeling the pain; (3) balanced recollection of the life and death of the deceased; (4) gradual separation of the bereaved from the deceased; and (5) resumption of interpersonal and social activity, even while acknowledging the finality of the loss (1944, 1976, 1980).

Central to grief work is the change of the meaning of the deceased, specifically, the transition from a physical being to a spiritual presence within the bereaved.

This shift is both difficult and constructive, because the loss hurts and sometimes requires taking on a new familial or social role. Although the person has departed, he or she remains in the minds and hearts of the survivors. Lindemann calls this change resurrection, and he defines it as a "fervent effort to resurrect or make permanent what the deceased person had to offer (1976, 202)

 “Resurrection" includes a reallocation of the functions of the deceased in the network of survivors, internalization of one or more of these functions, and actualizing these for oneself. Avoidance of the vivid imagery, accompanying these tasks, obstructs resurrection and delays or disturbs the grief work.

Even though Lindemann recognized the significant role of imagery in grief work, only a few clinicians have examined it since his death in 1972. One reason for the relative neglect is confusion in definitions. For example, in a study of 227 Welsh widows and 66 widowers Dewi Rees explains that "a sense of the presence " of the deceased spouse was

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reported in 46.7% of deaths. He writes that the term 'hallucination' is used to include 'a sense of the presence of the dead person,' in addition  to visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations" (Rees 1975, 66). His definition is tautological, because it confuses the meanings of presence and hallucinations. Despite the logical and semantic confusion, the Rees study contains significant empirical data. Along with "the sense of presence,

14 % had visual "hallucinations," 13.3% auditory, and 2.7% tactile. "Hallucinations" were more common for those who had happy marriages, with children, and who belonged to professional and managerial classes. Rees judged the "hallucinations" to be normal and common, unassociated with illness or abnormality, but helpful in the grieving process. To illustrate, same of his case material is quoted below:

"He seems so c1ose" (widowed 7 years). "I heard, how shall I put it, sounds of consolation for the first three months" (widowed 26 years). "I feel him guiding me" (widowed 15 years).

"I fancy, if I left here, I would be running away from him. Lots of people wanted me to go, but I just couldn't. I often hear him walking about. He speaks quite plainly. He looks younger, just as he was when he was all right, never as he was ill" (widowed 9 months). (69)

If these presences were helpful to the bereaved, then they should not be described as hallucinations. As defined in chapter four, hallucinations leave people unchanged. Since these phenomena facilitate grief work, they should be given a positive reference that respects the intent of dreams and visions. Presence is an appropriate term, and it has been defined as an "experience in which the subject, in clear consciousness, suddenly becomes aware of the presence of another person in the immediate vicinity, although the subject may in reality be alone, or in the company of others" (Thompson 1980,628). Despite the tautology in the definition, the author attempts an original formulation by using the German term Anwesenheit for "presence." He distinguishes it from sensory objects, hallucinations, and delusions. Usually, the identity of the presence is that of a deceased relative, who offers comfort but sometimes a threat. Presence comes involuntarily, in the manner of an

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epileptic aura, and it is normal in grief. Therefore, the presence, if properly defined, facilitates the resurrection phase of grief work. From the perspective of ego psychology, presence conforms to the dynamics of introjective-participation. After the death, the bereaved person incorporates the image of the "deceased" through identification.

Death releases an unconscious introjection mechanism that works like a camera, photographing images of the lost object (Szondi 1956, 199).

The intensity of the affective and traumatic impact of the loss influences the sharpness and clarity of the photographic image (Hyper-Introjektion). The bereaved maintain the images in a mental album. The primary intent of the introjection is to restore the relationship, because ego states obey the primal drive for participation in social and metaphysical reality. As will be discussed below, dreams and visions of grief may also introject the presence of a deceased ancestor. A familial introjection bears upon the role of decision-making in grief work, such as ending mourning or making vocational choices.

Whether personal or familial, introjective-participation means that fundamentally grief work is a matter of relatedness. Even though a physical being has died, the relationship has not. The relationship continues after death, and grief work means that it must change.

Completed grief work signifies the achievement of a spiritual relatedness with the deceased, or resurrection, as Lindemann would say, as well as an adaptation to social and metaphysical reality. Complicated or uncompleted grief work indicates a maladaptive response to reality, fixation on the introjected object, and disorganized behavior. Complicated grief work remains a distinct possibility, because the loss of a dependency relationship, even if liberating, carries a hidden depressive mood (Szondi 1972, 194).

Similarly, Jungian psychology recognizes that mourning is partly detachment from the lost object but mainly the creation of a new relationship with the dead. The medium of bereavement relatedness is the creative imagination. Drawing upon the work of Jung and Corbin, Greg Mogenson has developed an imaginal view of mourning as "greeting the angels" (1992). He means that after the separation phase of grief work the dead reproduce themselves as essential, imaginal beings, who are autonomous and who should be respected as ends in themselves. The imaginal forms need not be interpreted but simply incorporated into the living. As long as the dead are internalized by the bereaved, then the latter will not be projecting or introjecting the lost

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object in the mode of abnormal grief. Rather mourning is soul-making; for the dead dwell in the soul like photographs in a family album (24). Grief develops the images in the film of death.  Although Szondi had already stressed the notions of the photograph album and ancestral presence, the Jungian approach is a constructive affirmation of the adaptive aspect of grief work. However, the Jungian method tends to neglect the critical psychodynamic phase of grief work, such as ambivalence and despair. What if the deceased were greeted not as an angel but as a terror of the night? What if the dead were felt as hauntings? In such cases, the analysis should examine the quality of the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased. Mogenson has written an original and stimulating study of grief, stressing the transition from relatedness to imaginal being. However, his selection of case material omits, in some areas, specifically death-related imagery. For example, in his chapter on bereavement dreams, the examples chosen derive from a divorce rather than from death (89-97). Divorce yields a being who has departed but not one who has died. In conclusion, hallucinations, presences, dreams, visions, and apparitions emerge in the grieving process, and all but hallucinations contribute to the completion of grief work. It is imperative to discover and interpret these imaginal phenomena, because in contemporary society often the bereaved receive no guidance from established social or religious rituals. The demonstrated value of traditional mourning rituals is that they channel feelings aroused by the death, prescribe constructive behavior, and help the bereaved to reintegrate with familial or social groups. As substitutes for rituals, dreams and visions appear, and provide a subjective narrative framework. In whatever form they take, bereavement images reflect the nature of the relationships involved. They obey the law of participation.

II. BEREAVEMENT DREAMS

Sigmund Freud interpreted bereavement dreams as fulfillments of a death wish (1953, S.E.IV, 249). The death wish is not satisfied in the present time but in the past. Hence, to dream that one's mother has died, after her actual death, satisfies an earlier death wish against her. While this type of situation may occur, this theory cannot apply to all cases but only to those in which the grief entails an intense sense of guilt.

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In contrast, Jung viewed bereavement dreams in terms of the process of self-realization. The dream displays the deceased in his or her primal form, objectively, and devoid of projections and emotions. Jung achieved this insight, after the death of his wife Emma, who appeared in a dream, having the quality of a vision:

She stood at same distance from me, looking at me squarely. She was in her prime, perhaps about thirty, and wearing the dress which had been made for her many years before by my cousin the medium. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever worn. Her expression was neither joyful nor sad, hut, rather, objectively wise and understanding, without the slightest emotional reaction

Jung's experience offers an excellent example of a bereavement dream as a constructive event, but we do not know whether the dream says something about the nature of his marriage or about the grief process in general. To supplement Jung's basic insight a theory of bereavement dreams should acknowledge the respective personal, familial, and collective/archetypal regions of the unconscious, and indicate how these bear upon grief work.

Bereavement dreams can arrive shortly before a death or sometimes after, possibly a few days after or several weeks. Dreams signify the fact that, although someone has died, the relationship with the bereaved continues. Dreams reflect the fundamental relational constitution of human beings. Generally, the content of a normal bereavement dream is clear, undistorted, and the deceased is portrayed in a youthful, healthy, or non-terminal manner (Gorer 1973, 430). Should the deceased be presented as sick, aged, or dying, along with unclear, distorted lines, then the dream reflects an on-going complication in the relationship with the deceased. Such a dream signifies that grief work is either inhibited or uncompleted. When the deceased has no shape at all, then the bereaved has not brought the relationship into self-consciousness. A severe conflict may be present unconsciously, and participation is blocked in same way.

In the remainder of this section same examples of bereavement dreams are presented and discussed. The first comes from a former student of mine who had a dream, recurring three times during her father's death. Three days before his death, she had the dream twice,

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once in the morning and once in the evening. The dream appeared once after his death. On each occasion the dream was the same. The significance of a thrice-repeated dream is that conflict is being resolved and brought up to the threshold of consciousness (Benz 1968, 15). As an illustration, Dostoevsky's dream of his father, his ancestors, and the father's diagnosis of his tuberculosis also came three times (Frank and Goldstein 1987, 353-354). The student describes her dream as follows:

It was late at night and my whole family was together in our living room. I was standing in the dining room watching my family. My father was sitting on the sofa and my two sisters were on either side of him. My mother was sitting on a chair next to them. My father was playing with my dog that was very old and feeble. It had been a long time since my dog was well enough to play ball, and he was running around like a puppy again. We were all laughing at him as he tried to get the ball away from my father. My father acted as he had when he was well, smiling and happy. I could see his face very clearly and I felt good seeing him looking so well.

I was standing away from my family looking and talking to them. I can't remember what I was saying, but I believe I was complaining about something being wrong. My father looked up at me and said: "M., don't worry. Everything's going to be all right. Don't worry." I remember feeling greatly relieved....

The dreamer's waking consciousness recedes, while familial figures take center stage. The father's change from a dying to a healthy state in the dream signifies surpassing the threshold. His message of consolation, presented as a mandate, indicates positive adaptation in the dreamer's grieving. The key archetypal symbol is the dog. In reality the dog was old and feeble, but in the dream the dog becomes a puppy again.

The appearance of the dog is an archetypal affirmation of normal grief work. In Old Iranian religion and Zoroastrianism the dog is the mediator between the living and the dead (Boyce 1989, 144). Zoroastrian Creation Theology ranks dogs next to humans in order of value. In the Hindu Vedas two dogs are messengers of Yama, god of the dead; and they find those who are about to die and take them to the

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other life. In Zoroastrianism two dogs await the soul of the deceased at the Chinvat Bridge. For the dying, the last rites are performed three times. Thus, the three fold appearance of the dream, the ritual use of number three, and the dog reflect the religious culture that developed the symbolism of the bridge.

A second example comes from a former student, whose father died in the fall of 1989. Having been a severe a1coholic, he generated a deep ambivalence in his daughter. She loved him but hated his drinking. In February, 1990, on the night of his birthday, she dreamed that "my father was at my house and he was a recovered alcoholic. He said he was going to be fine and he would never leave me again."

Another dream appeared, in which she could not see her father's face dearly but knew it was he:

He was very ill and had come to apologize to me for never really sharing my childhood and watching me grow through my teen years. He said that it was probably for the best that he wasn't around, because he wouldn't have been much of a parent because he was too involved with his drinking.

The house in the first dream represents the dreamer's own psyche, as inferred from Jung's house dream (1961, 158). Both dreams deal with the dreamer's need for attachment to the father. In the first dream the need is satisfied; but in the second it is not, because the absence of the father's face means that the relationship has not achieved self-consciousness. Here the grief is intense, and the sorrow over the father's remorse suggests loneliness, broken bonding, and incomplete grief work.   Viewed together, both dreams convey a profound ambivalence.

 A third example consists of a series of bereavement dreams reported  by the Jungian scholar Marie-Louise von Franz (1987, 111-112, 133, 148). Her father had died suddenly, when she was away from home, and she had the following dream about three weeks after his death:

It was about ten o'dock in the evening, dark outside. I heard the doorbell ring and "knew" at once somehow that this was my father coming. I opened the door and there he stood with a suitcase……..   I know that I am dead , but may I not visit you?”

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I said: "Of course, come in," and then asked, "How are you now?"

Her father explains that he has returned to Vienna, his home-town, that he is studying music and is happy. He says he is only a guest now:

"It is not good for either the dead or the living to be together too long. Leave me now. Good night." And with a gesture he signaled me not to embrace him, but to go. I went into my own room, thinking that I had forgotten to put out the electric stove and that there was a danger of fire. At that moment I"woke up, feeling terribly hot and sweating.

Following Jung, she interprets the dream as a statement of the bereavement situation. Her father had died and had become content. The motif of the stove and fire at the end is a compensation for the fact that the dead are cold; e.g. the dead are "split-off" from the living and their warmth and relatedness.

In my view, the meaning of the stove is entirely different, and it bears upon the nature of epilepsy; namely, fire as a psychic equivalent of a latent epileptiform condition (Szondi 1956, 99). The "danger .of fire" is the threat of pent-up emotion, triggered by the absence of the father, and probably an upsurge of anger. Waking up hot and sweating designates a post-paroxysmal consequence of an emotional discharge.

Furthermore, about six weeks after his death, she dreamed of her father as healthy and alive, even though she knew he was dead:

He said to me in cheerful excitement, "the resurrection of the flesh is a reality. Come with me, I can show it to you." He started walking toward the cemetery where he was buried. I dreaded to follow him but I did. In the cemetery he walked around and between the graves, observing every one. Suddenly he pointed to a grave and called out. "Here, for instance, come and look." I saw that the earth there had begun to move and I stared in that direction, full of dread that a half-decomposed corpse was about to appear. Then I saw that a crucifix was drilling its way upwards out of the earth. It was about one meter long, golden-green and shilling. My father called out, "Look here! This is the resurrection of the flesh."

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As a Jungian, her starting point is ancient alchemy and the archaic pre-Christian psyche. Accordingly, the green-gold crucifix is animated metal, and in alchemy this symbolizes a union of opposites. The suffering implied in the archetype of the crucifix is that of unreconciled opposites. Hence, the dream portrays the resurrection body as a union of opposites, which is the fulfillment of the self and which is joined to the ego, namely, her father's identity.

I read this dream instead as an expression of grief work. Here resurrection simply means newly completed grief work, as Lindemann has explained, but the crucifix and the dread indicate that the dreamer has not yet made the decisive sacrifice, or break from the deceased, and resumed social interaction. Her grief work is not finished.

Finally, she describes a dream coming five years after her father's death, in which she and her sister jump onto tram number eight, heading for the center of Zurich. They realized that they have made a mistake and are going in the opposite direction. The conductor (controlleur) walks through the tram, wearing a hat with the letters EWZ, which designate the Electricity Works of Zurich.

At the next tram stop we got off and there a taxi drove up near us and out of it-came my father! I knew it was his ghost. When I started to greet him he made a sign not to come too near him and then walked away to the house where he had lived. I called after him. "We don't live there any more." But he shook his head and murmured, "That doesn't matter to me now."

The key dream motifs are the number eight and the conductor (controlleur). In alchemy eight is the number of completion, and the "controlleur" is associated with the control in spiritualistic séances "who mediates between the medium and deceased spirits. Since the "controlleur" is from the electrical works, he signifies a transformed frequency of currents. Thus, death as the goal of self-realization is also an energy transformation beyond a certain threshold.

Her insight into the threshold function of the dream contributes to a unified theory of dreamwork, as developed in chapter four, section two. Here I would observe that the three bereavement dreams have had the threshold function of working the grief to that of separation from the deceased. The notion of electrical works relates to that of heat and fire in the first dream, where it means pent-up emotion, such as anger. In

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this, the third dream, the e1ectricity denotes the sublimation of anger. The dreamer has essentially come to terms with her father's death and is able to live with the anger of his abrupt departure.

_ Sublimation of anger points to the possibility of restitution, as expressed archetypically. Historically, alchemy did not evolve in complete separation from Christianity; for example, the Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme used alchemy to interpret the world as alive (Koyre 1968, 45). Thus, the number eight could also refer to the eighth day of Creation or the resurrection. Making a Christian application of the number eight allows the second dream, with the resurrection of the flesh, to cohere with the third dream. Since restitution is a liberating experience, making possible participation in fundamental reality, then the controlleur would be the pontifical self which is the inner controller.

III. BEREAVEMENT VISIONS

In the grieving process the sense of presence often comes in the form of a vision. The visionary presence is involuntary, frequently overpowering, and usually consoling; it is neither a sensory object nor a feeling. Since the vision comforts the bereaved, it may appear toward the end of mourning, signifying the completion of grief work. In the following two examples the recipients of the vision do not startle, but in the absence of anxiety achieve a deeper and wider participation.

The first case illustrates how the presence, which comes during a marital crisis, helps a man accept his grandfather's death:

Suddenly I felt someone behind me, and turned around and, God, it was my grandfather. He was sitting there, perfectly real, and kind of smiled at me. My body felt relaxed, I wasn't shaking any more, and seeing him there was so strange that I wasn't even startled. We just looked at each other, maybe for half a minute, and then he just was gone. I cried for some time, but I felt after that I had made my peace with him. I still missed him, but things were somehow different. I wasn 't carrying him around inside of me, he was finally gone (Hoyt 1980-1981, 106).

The second example comes from a former student, whose father died on January 26, 1979, when she was nine years old and the youngest child in the family. He died unexpectedly in an automobile accident.

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My student informs me that the story has an epilogue. A. had attended the funeral of her great grandmother and took home a rose from a bouquet.

A. placed the rose in a vase filled with water and placed the vase on her bedroom window sill. Naturally, the rose had died within a few days, and the petals had withered away. Over the next few weeks, and parallell to A.'s visitations, the rose stem sprung to life, and to this day it still remains alive.

The rose remained alive, at 1east, until July, 1992, when I officiated at the wedding of the student and A.'s mother. In my view the angel is an exact projection of the physical features of the mother, and the angel's white dress is the mother' s wedding gown. The projected presence of the mother assures the child in facing the momentous change brought about by the wedding. The mother had been divorced for several years and was preparing to be remarried.

The springing to life of the rose is an example of psychokinesis, which psychoanalysis explains as an externalization of aggressive energy, usually by adolescents feeling sexual conflict. The discharge of energy is destructive of objects in the environment. However, the psychoanalytic explanation fails to fit in this case for two reasons: the subject is pre-pubescent and the energy is constructive not destructive. Meanwhile, the other episodes are genuine ancestral visions, and, in the absence of a convincing psychoanalytic explanation, may have discharged energy that effected the rose. It is already known that dying organisms emit intense electromagnetic energy (Morse with Perry 1992, 142). While this might be too speculative, the projected image of the mother, the ancestral visions, and the new life of the rose express, respectively, the personal, familial, and archetypal unconscious regions of the girl.

IV. TERRORS OF THE NIGHT

When Frederic Myers conceptualized the subliminal self, he acknowledged a phenomenon of nocturnal paralysis, believing it to be a nightmare associated with hysteria (I 1903/1954, 124). It occurred on the border between sleeping and waking, and it produced imagery with so much visual power that it lingered as an afterimage.

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A similar observation appears in the new scientific school of dreams. Dream-like forms, called hypnopompic hallucinations, come on arousal from sleep and extend into waking consciousness; and when they combine with sleep paralysis, terror results. (Hobson 1988, 8). The neurological reason is that the brain cannot switch instantly from one state to another.

The neurological explanation neglects the personal significance of the phenomena. Clinically, this factor has been identified as a night terror, and, in contrast to the nightmare, it comprises four primary characteristics:

(1) feeling of fear or agonizing dread by seeing or hearing an intrusive presence; (2) awakening from sleep; (3) feeling of pressure on the chest to the point of suffocation or strangulation; and (4) becoming paralyzed and unable to move (Hufford 1982, 10-11). The intrusive force may have location, motion, or gender. With the assault by this presence one's eyes open widely, the heart pounds, and one perspires. Nearly all of the victims (90%) are lying on their backs.

Since victims are lying on their backs, psychoanalysis interprets night terrors as projections of repressed sexual or incestuous desires. However, the primary characteristics are epileptiform and, therefore, suggest that the night terrors represent the paroxysmal pattern. In any case, they are neither abnormal nor depressive in themselves, but in the grieving process they pose potential complications for grief work.

To illustrate I select the experience of a former student, a middle­ aged woman, who studied with me in the fall semester, 1975. She had married a veteran of the Second World War. Once, in combat, he was hit in the

chest by a projectile, and shrapnel remained above the heart. A military physician recommended surgical removal of the shrapnel, when he returned home. He promised he would, but after the war ended, he failed to do so.

In February, 1953 he died of a coronary occ1usion. His young widow found herself alone, having to raise their little boy, and manage the household. In a paper for me she wrote: "I functioned in a state of shock. It all seemed unreal. I experienced nausea, loss of appetite, tightness in the throat and chest, and emptiness as though part of me had died. "

For a while, she considered suicide but gave it up with the realization that her son needed at least a parent. She had difficulty making decisions and fervently prayed and wished that her husband might return to help her.

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It happened for the first time about two months after his death.

A white, ghost-like form appeared to be standing at the foot of my bed. I could feel a presence and I tried desperately to see his face but there was none. It seemed as though he wanted to say something but was unable to and just stood there. The tension of waiting for something to happen frightened me and I found myself trying to scream. The emotion was so real that I didn't realize that I was asleep until my scream awakened me and I found myself sitting straight-up in bed. I could see the vision so clearly that it was difficult for me to believe that my eyes were not opened until I awakened.

Between 1953 and 1975, the presence came regularly. She looked forward to it and tried not to be afraid, but every night she screamed in terror and became paralyzed. Remarkably, this presence, which originally stood at the foot of the bed, began to move slowly toward the corner, turn, and go along the side. Over the span of 22 years, the presence slowly inched toward her. It seemed to be getting closer and closer and I am afraid to come in contact with it because I fear it will smother me. Recently I have gotten awake with my mouth filled with saliva about to choke on it. If he is coming to take me with him I am only too glad to go. I have been ready for death since his death occurred.

During the same 22 years, but not lasting as long, she had a bereavement dream co-existing with the night terror:

I can see him as clear as can be in his original form but he  has never communicated with me. There is always a group of people around and I try to get his attention, but he ignores me. My feelings are hurt and I stand around waiting for him to recognize me and to come toward me but he never does. When I awake I am emotionally distressed.

About two years after the death, she married and eventually bore two more children. The family moved from one city to another within Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, the presence "followed" and visited her at

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night, always in the same manner. Despite her marriage and move, she still wanted to be buried next to her first husband. She thought she was crazy; but when she told me her story in 1975, I suggested that her night terror reflected a complicated and unfinished grief work. On the one  hand, the dream had the features of a normal bereavement dream but indicated an unsatisfied need for attachment with the deceased. On the other hand, the terrifying presence, with its absence of distinct form, implies that the death has not been integrated into self-consciousness. The ambivalent absence and presence, desire and fear manifest on-going conflict in the relationship.

Underlying this ambivalence were two dynamic forces. One was a clinging to the deceased, a futile hanging on to him which created the ambivalence (Szondi 1980, 263). The other was a chronic guilt, probably due to the fact that she never encouraged her first husband to remove the shrapnel from his chest. Thus, a guilt-laden, agitated depression informed her background self, and, meanwhile, in the foreground she adapted to social reality by sustaining family life and working as a secretary.

She accepted my explanation of unfinished grief work, and, by gaining this insight, the presence ceased its regular visitations. However, the vision did not disappear entirely, but would reappear under two conditions. One, if her first son, having grown up and married, would come home for a visit, as on a holiday; and the other, when she would exchange emotion with him by letter or telephone. In either case, the presence would come precisely on the night before his visit or on the night after the emotional exchange. These two conditions imply that she was sustaining the bond with the first husband through the son.

This case demonstrates that night terrors, seemingly supernatural forces, derive from human relationships. The intensity of threat presupposes a distance in the relationship; for as one gets closer to death, anxiety diminishes. Since the relationship is impaired by chronic grieving, then the startle pattern is activated phobically. Normally, the consoling presence of dreams and visions suppresses the startle and comforts the bereaved.

However, the night terror reveals a personal splitting, in which the ego, bereft of wholeness, submits to the intrusive force and wishes to die. The night terror frustrates the need for restitution, so that this need can only be satisfied in death.

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V. HAUNTINGS AND RADIANT APPARITIONS

Occasionally, night terrors overlap with hauntings, which are exterior energy forces, acting intentionally, and appearing in a specific place, either for a short or long duration. Frederic Myers conceived of hauntings as "split-off" parts of a veridical afterimage. With the establishment of psychoanalysis, hauntings would be interpreted as projections of repressed or forbidden wishes by persons having low tolerance for frustration (Kastenbaum 1984, 124).

Some common hauntings are footsteps in the hallway, shuffling sounds, loud noises, opening doors, rocking chairs, luminous "ghosts," and the moving of bed covers. Less common would be enhanced scent from flowers. A former student describes her grandmother's terminal cancer:

My grandmother bad received these beautiful baby red roses from a friend. And they were set on a table near where my grandmother was lying in her bed. And my grandfather had told my mom and aunts that every time he would enter the room and would go between the roses and my grandmother the scent was so strong. My mom told me that she can remember him describing it as a "scented path." This "scented path" was a direct path from the roses to my grandmother.

The scent expresses the shock of anticipatory grief, in as much as the sense of smell is a paroxysmal-epileptiform motif, as stated in chapter two.

Frequently, hauntings emanate from shock deaths, such as suicides and homicides, when restitution cannot be met. Marie-Louise von Franz theorizes that emotional intensities of death involve a struggle between bodily based affect and pure psychic energy. The trauma of dying itself intensifies the psyche which, in the internal bodily struggle, expels affects explosively. She offers an example:

When I was about twenty-four years old, I lived in a rented room in the house of a sixteen year old girl and her nurse. One night I dreamed that a terrible explosion occurred. The nurse and I crouched behind a wall in order not to be hit by stones and lumps of earth flying about. When I awakened I was informed

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that during the night the girl had committed suicide with sleeping pills (von Franz 1987, 84).

'She explains that with suicide the life energy is not used up naturally, and in the danger the archetype of fire takes over the energy. As argued in chapter two, fire symbolizes pent-up emotion, which is discharged to satisfy the need for restitution. With a suicide restitution cannot be made in life bur only in death. Experimental data confirm that affective energy may be experienced telepathically in dreams (Ullman and Krippner 1973).

In her study of apparitions Aniela Jaffe has generalized on a wide range of case material and arrived at useful conclusions. When the dead are manifest apparitionally to relatives or close friends, they appear radiant and transfigured by a sublime beauty. Unrelated, deceased beings are disclosed as anonymous, veiled, shadowy, grey, or dark presences (Jaffe 1963, 56-57). Radiance denotes familial relatedness or friendship, and radiant apparitions in the veridical afterimage facilitate or help complete grief work. For example, a deceased father appeared to his daughter, several years after his death. He had died, when she was nine years old, and she grieved inconsolably for many years. One night on Christmas eve, suddenly I heard the door open and there were soft footsteps with a strange noise of knocking. I was alone at home and was rather frightened. Then the mirac1e happened -my beloved father came towards me, shining and lovely as gold, and transparent as mist. He looked just as he did in life, I could recognize his features quite clearly, then he stopped beside my bed and looked at me lovingly and smiled. A great peace entered into me and I felt happier than I had felt before. . . then he went away (57)

VI. PROJECTIVE SHOCK VISIONS

On January 26, 1983 a former student of mine, then a social worker, discussed with me one of her current cases. A 25 year old musician was grieving the death of his wife in a brutal automobile accident. Two young children survived the death of their mother, and one child was a six month old baby boy. The man had frequent flashbacks to the scene

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of the accident during the day, and at night he often awakened with a startle. After awakening, he would behold his wife standing at the foot of the bed. He would separate from his body, float up to the ceiling and look back upon his body in bed, while his wife was calling to him. He would cry out to his parents, sleeping in the other room, to come and see that his wife had returned. She would say no and explained that she only wished to talk to him.

These visions took place during the first six months after the accident. Throughout that period, the baby slept in the same bed with his father; he too would awaken startled, as did his father, and he may have been aware of his mother standing at the foot of the bed. With the coming of the vision the man would feel fear and exhilaration. He wanted to go with her, but he had to stay with his children.

This case is unique with the combination of a "take-away" vision, "out-of-body" state, and symptoms of acute grieve. The cycle of daily flashbacks and nightly startle conveys an intensity of grief with a deep sense of anxiety. The fear and exhilaration comprise the ambivalence that is characteristic of early grieve. The flashbacks are an ad hoc introjection (Augenblick-Introjektion), which recollects the accident with an underlying guilt and depression. The flashback functions as a "possession-ideal" (Besitzideale), which triggers a desire to have the lost love object (Szondi 1956, 199). This desire is a motivating factor in the "out-of-body" phase of the grieve. The bereaved man strips away his body, expands his psyche, in order to have his wife again. Thus, amid the ambivalent character of early grieve work introjective and projective thought modes interact on a paroxysmal-hysteriform base. Both introjective and projective modes operate as defenses against death anxiety.

In the same year Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross reported a similar situation, in which grieve work was completed. A man suffered the death of his wife and children, who were burned to death in a fiery explosion, when their car was hit by a gasoline truck. Unable to resolve this tragedy, the man lost his job and home, became suicidal and addicted to cocaine, heroin, codeine, and vodka, in a desperate attempt to evade the grieve. At one point in his despair, when drugged and drunk on a country road, he saw a large truck approaching:

He watched, half-conscious, as the truck drove over him. He then became aware of drifting out of his body without any pain

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or anxiety. He floated away and approached a light. Suddenly out of this light came his family! His wife and his children-as happy, healthy, and smiling as he remembered them, all of them together. "They did not speak, but I was able to understand everything. I suddenly knew that they were weIl. They had no scars, no bum marks. They were just there to show that they were all right and together" (Kiibler-Ross 1983, 212). He decided not to join them in death but willed to atone for his losses by achieving a constructive life. The loss of his wife and the loss of his children created a two-fold grieving process. Parental loss of a child complicates grief work severely. The child is an extension of oneself, so that it is difficult to achieve detachment from the lost object. Such a loss inflicts a deep narcissistic wound, involving extreme ego phases. Thus, the grief was blocked by a total despair and negativism, as exemplified by suicide and addiction. These were inadequate forms of substitutionary participation with the dead. His shock on the country road stripped away his body and expanded his psyche to the point of a momentary participation. The vision of his family had the characteristics of a normal bereavement dream as well as those of a near-death experience. The projective participatory shock vision resolved the despair, released his will to act, and provided a joyous atonement. The scenery of the vision (seelische Schauplatz) came out of the familial unconscious, which is the origin of  the man's decision-making ability.

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CHAPTER SIX: ECSTASY OF MORTAL DANGER

I. ACCELERATION OF THOUGHT

The foregoing study of death-bed visions and bereavement dreams has shown that the shock of death generates a radiant being, which facilitates acceptance or participation, particularly in familial relationships. In this chapter our study extends to those cases, in which people have come close to death by trauma or by disease, survived and have been changed in some way. In his work Frederic Myers cited a case of apparent death and urged others to study this kind of situation (1903/1954, II, 315).

The principal theorist in modern times was Albert Heim, Professor of Geology at the University of Zurich, who was born in 1849 and died in 1937. Professionally, he conducted research on the structure of the Alps and, in the course of his work, suffered several falls. He reflected on his own falls and studied those of thirty other persons. In 1892 he published a paper analyzing the impact of the falls, and it has been translated into English by Russell Noyes and Roy Kletti with the title "Remarks on Fatal Falls" (1972, 45-52).

Heim discovered that 95 % of fall victims had the same kind of experience, regardless of the nature of their mishap, and he summarized the uniform core as follows:

.. .no grief was felt, nor was there paralyzing fright of the sort that can happen in instances of lesser danger (e.g. outbreak of fire). There was no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain, but rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense of surety, mental activity became

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enormous, rising to a hundred-fold velocity or intensity. The relationships of events and their probable outcomes were overviewed with objective clarity. No confusion entered at all. Time became greatly expanded. The individual acted with lightning-quickness in accord with accurate judgment of his situation (46-47).

Heim added that in some cases there may be a life review, the hearing of beautiful celestial music, or a transfiguration by light.

During the crisis, victims act consciously and not reflexively. The impact of the shock reveals a natural necessity to which they surrender. Giving into the necessity evokes love, harmony, and fusion of subject and object. In the face of death conflict dissolves. However, should any illness be present already then the victim's consciousness may be clouded.

Heim achieved a fundamental insight, namely, that in the most profound startle the mind accelerates rapidly, achieving active control without pain. In contrast, superficial surprises result in a paralysis of thought and action. Thus, dread exhibits a distance from the object or from the danger. Heim's insights imply that mind varies with respect to the intensity of shock. Both high and low level threats presuppose a permeable continuum of paroxysmal activity. To be close to death is to be less threatened, to be distanced more so.

"Paralysis also comes to those who witness fatal or near fatal accidents. From the outside the trauma seems horrible and has long ­lasting effects; but from the inside the trauma delivers the victim into an intensely pleasurable state.

In the absence of preceding illness it ensues in clear consciousness, in heightened sensory and ideationaL activity, and without anxiety or pain. Those of our friends who have died -in the mountains have, in their last moments, reviewed their individual pasts in states of transfiguration (51).

Enhanced peace, joy, and painlessness are psychic equivalents of death.

Although Heim's paper contained seminal insights, it was essentially neglected until 1930, when Oskar Pfister published a psychoanalytic analys is of his findings. Pfister's paper has been translated into English by Noyes and Kletti with the title "Shock Thoughts and Fantasies in

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Extreme Mortal Danger" (1981, 5-20). Pfister acknowledges that in moments of danger thought speeds up or slows down, but he wonders which occurs under what conditions. After reading Heim's paper, Pfister points out that shock-thought is determined by two activities. One is reality based, and the other is an autistic denial of the shock itself. The denial derives from the intensification of thought, exclusion of fear, and pleasurable fantasies. Since Pfister himself had fallen twice in the mountains, he asserts that the "fall and its danger are first realized, then derealized. Previously, Pfister had written a letter to Heim, inquiring about his personal fall experiences. Heim replied in a letter on December 17, 1929, which Pfister quoted in his paper. Several lines are excerpted below:

In the moment in which I slipped in a difficult place it was clear to me that I would fall helplessly and quite probably to my death. This quick insight produced, however, no fright, no anxiety. I then had a series of singularly clear flashes of thought among a rapid, profuse succession of images that were clear and distinct. Thoughtful recollections were mixed with exhilarating representations, perhaps also hallucinations. I couldn't say what the exact succession was. I believe that it was almost instantaneous. I can perhaps compare it best to rapidly projected images or with the rapid sequence of dream images. I saw the images as though they were projected on a wall. One gave way to another, but all without haste, in a pleasing sequence and with copious changings, without any emotional interruptions .

I acted out my life, as though I were an actor on a stage, upon which I looked down as though from practically the highest gallery in the theatre. Both hero and onlooker, I was as though doubled.

My sisters and especially my wonderful mother, who was so important in my life, were around me. It was a feeling of submission to necessity. There I was arching over me...a beautiful blue sky. There sounded solemn music It seems that the theatrical performance of my life

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began with school and ended with the fall backwards into emptiness or sky (9-10).

Pfister defines Heim's images as autistic fantasies that "replace and repress" thought about physical reality. The principle is the same as that in dreamwork; "To protect us from shock, the unconscious occupies us with fantasy, manufacturing it from emotionally comforting images that are meaningless because [it is] torn out of context" (12). From Heim's experiences, Pfister deduces the following defenses against the threat of mortal danger; (1) replacing disturbing content with non-threatening material; (2) defending against danger by making it delusional or weakened, as with deja vu; (3) admitting pain but without details; and (4) overcoming of dread by comforting and pleasing fantasy (13).  Pfister takes over Freud's concept of the stimulus barrier, which means that the mind pervades the entire sensory system, defending against threats in accord with the pleasure principle. With reference to mortal danger the pleasure principle generates shock fantasies -as forms of defense. Pfister also confirms Heim's insights into the degrees of shock but explains that the observed acceleration of thought is actually a separation from reality through derealization, which "is like the feeling of being a mere spectator and seeing one's life passing across a stage" (14). Derealization resembles splitting, even though the identity of the observer remains intact. Pfister acknowledges different kinds of shock fantasies that transform reality. Some project comforting memories, others those of the future, metaphysical places, celestial music, or religious beliefs. These are like' day dreams in the sense that they protect waking consciousness and prevent sleeping or fainting. In contrast, dreams protect sleep by allowing the sleeper to enjoy wish-fulfilling images. Both dreams and shock fantasies are regressive, because the life review presents only the pleasurable moments of one's past and not one's entire life. The deja vu diminishes danger by giving the victim the impression of having been through the crisis previously. The pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle through the absence of pain and the displacement of death by childhood wishes. When the threat of death invades the sensory systems, pleasurable fantasies erupt like a flash into consciousness from the unconscious. Fantasies are projected by the unconscious will to live, and the flash is released by the preconscious, acting as a filter between consciousness and

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unconsciousness. Shock fantasies totally dominate consciousness, expelling any awareness of death. In conclusion, the principal value of Pfister's paper is his preserving Heim's original findings; otherwise, he succeeds only in presenting a questionable interpretation, because Freud's theory of mind has been challenged by neurology. In the remainder of this section I sketch an interpretation of Heim's findings which are summarized as follows: (1) acceleration of thought; (2) reduction of pain and anxiety; (3) consciousness of death; (4) projected imagery and duality of observer and observed; (5) submission to necessity; and (6) aura of emptiness.

The intense acceleration of thought indicates adaptation to mortal danger and a turning toward fundamental (= transcendental.lb) reality. The turn takes place in the submission to necessity.

Within fundamental reality time and space are relativized, and personal being is transformed into pure form without matter, extension or continuum. The reduction of pain and anxiety presupposes the annulment of the startle pattern and an opening into a transcendent reality. Since pain varies with cortical levels, its reduction reveals the hierarchical organization of the brain. Higher meanings nullify the pain messages of the sensory systems. With its complexity the mind can adapt to life-threatening crises without regressing. projection is aided by dream work, which functions to generate meaning and value and not just to protect sleep. Adaptation also includes knowledge of death, and this facilitates transcendent meaning and value.

The work of projection in the ego is to activate an optimal drive for  metaphysical reality: Projection is a normal function of a healthy mind. The duality of observer and observed conforms to Szondi's participatory theory of dreamwork, advanced in chapter four. Observing does not mean splitting or de-realizing; rather it signifies the receding of waking consciousness, when it surpasses a threshold and becomes hypnagogic. At this point the background self comes out in the form of unconscious personal, familial, and archetypal content. Frequently, the life review unfolds on the stage of the psyche prompting choices or submission to necessity. Finally, the "aura of emptiness" means that the self has become hypnopompic by means of epileptiform seizure activity. The Heim aura is like the Dostoevsky aura, with its sublime feelings of peace, joy, painlessness, and harmony. The seizure coincides with the shock of mortal danger and the resulting aura is both defensive and participatory. The sense of emptiness is not derealization

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but an adaptive fulfillment of the drive for participation. The aura of emptiness actualizes pontifical selfhood.

II. THE DEATH-FEIGNING REFLEX

In current discussions the tradition of Heim and Pfister is carried on by Russell Noyes, who not only confirms Heim's findings but also accounts for them by the concept of depersonalization. Noyes draws upon the work of Martin Roth and Max Harper, who claim that depersonalization informs both epilepsy and phobic anxiety (1962). They treat epilepsy as a purely neurological disturbance and neurosis as purely emotional, involving mainly phobic and avoidance reactions. Their approach goes against the neuropsychiatric perspective, stated in chapter one, according to which epilepsy has both neural and emotional aspects and neuroses derive from specific genetic groups.

Roth and Harper define depersonalization as "that dissociation or duplication of consciousness which is particularly associated with any heightening of stimulation that evokes acute fear or anxiety" (219). When confronting danger, depersonalization helps one to survive through vigilance and detachment. However, under extreme conditions normal adaptation may become exaggerated by inducing a "phobic-anxiety depersonalization syndrome, which manifests a "jerky, over- responsiveness. . . irritability, restlessness, insomnia", with closed-eye hallucinations if awake or hypnagogic hallucinations if falling asleep. In a neurosis energy overflows in the forms of traumas, palpitations, excessive perspiration, intolerance of heat, and attacks of panic. Hence, neurosis is a maladaptive variant of adaptive vigilance.

With the data offered by Roth and Harper Noyes claims to have discovered a  neural mechanism, which is activated in times of danger. The mechanism responds to perilous stimuli in alternating modes: heightened arousal, on the one hand, and dissociation of consciousness (depersonalization), on the other (Noyes 1979, 78). The former enhances vigilance, and the latter reduces potentially disorganizing consciousness. In either case, anxiety is present.

Noyes makes depersonalization a psychological defense against death. To be depersonalized is to mimic death, becoming numb, empty, and lifeless so as not be threatened. In the mimicry the ego splits into an observing self, separated from the threat in order to survive. The other part of the ego, the observed and embodied self, is sacrificed as it takes

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the brunt of the shock. Altogether the splitting is characterized by separation from the body, loss of emotion, altered sense of time, derealization of the physical world, and alien sights and sounds. These traits are obtained from falls, automobile accidents, near-drownings,  cardiac arrests, combat explosions, and allergic reactions.

As a polar mechanism, depersonalization adapts to two kinds of  danger. First, if one perceives impending death but does not actually die, then one experiences hyperalertness, including accelerated thought, enhanced seeing and hearing, altered sense of time, feeling of bliss, and possibly a life review. This hyperalertness-depersonalization would supposedly account for Heim's findings.

Second, if one actually dies and is resuscitated, then one enters a mystical state. Mystical depersonalization goes beyond a psychological defense to a genuinely spiritual dimension. It brings deep feelings of knowledge, clear images and visions, derealization of the body, recollections, control by outside forces, and revelation of joy and harmony.

 An example of this mystical harmony comes from a soldier whose jeep was blown up by a Nazi mine in World War II:

Almost immediately after the explosion, I was certain that death had occurred. I experienced no physical sensations, no sense perceptions. Rather I seemed to have entered a state in which only my thoughts or mind existed. I felt total serenity and peace. I had no remembrance of anything, only a realization that life had ended and that my mind was continuing to exist. I had no realization of time passing, only of one moment which never altered. Neither did I have any concept of space, since my existence seemed only mental. I cannot stress strongly enough the feeling of total peace of mind and of total blissful acceptance of my new status, which I knew would be never ending (Noyes and Kletti 1982, 61).

This mystical-depersonalization may unfold in three stages: (1) The impact of death evokes alarm, followed by resistance, fear, or struggle; then an upsurge of life energy that is blocked by an urge to surrender. (2) Having lost control, one beholds the life review as a panoramic replay of positive biographical events, when the observing self splits off from the body. (3) one enters a transcendent state of ecstasy, which is

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ineffable, timeless, spaceless, and unified, disclosing ultimate truth (Noyes 1972, 179-180).

Noyes' theory goes beyond Pfister's by properly emphasizing that the mind adapts to extreme danger and does not regress. Noyes is more coherent in the sense that he respects the complex unity of the brain-­mind system and displays more precision in search of a neural location for the experience. He also acknowledges the limitations of scientific method, when he accepts a mystical and religious dimension.

Nevertheless, I believe he appeals to a questionable model of epilepsy, and so I offer a critical assessment of Noyes' position. An even marc coherent explanation may be gained by recognizing that epilepsy and phobic anxiety, mimicry and mystical ecstasy are polar eruptions of the paroxysmal pattern. As conceptualized by Szondi, the paroxysmal pattern shares a genetic homology with the "feigning-death reflex" (Totstellreflex), which is a phylogenetic defense against danger that immobilizes oneself so as to appear dead (1960, 113). For humans the same reflex informs the clinical fact that epilepsy mimics or substitutes for death. The paroxysmal pattern also accounts for the acceleration of thought in the midst of danger, which yields a sense of ecstasy.

The paroxysmal pattern unfolds in a three fold rhythm: (1) accumulation of affect; (2) explosive discharge of affect, making one lose control and become unconscious; and (3) movement toward restitution or even the mystical ecstasy. This model may be considered as the motor ­force behind Noyes' three fold scheme of mystical experience: (1) alarm, resistance, struggle; (2) life review; and (3) transcendence.

In my view, depersonalization is the wrong term, because, as Noyes himself says, it narrows attention, reduces feeling, and causes a dullness or numbing (Noyes and Kletti 1982, 62). Depersonalized people become estranged from themselves, lifeless automatons and seemingly dead. They neither feel anything nor recall memories. When compared to epilepsy, depersonalization may come after or between seizures, bur it certainly does not fit the Dostoevsky aura. Both Heim and Noyes describe profound joy and ecstasy at the brink of death, but these are not a depersonalization.

Depersonalization is essentially a psychotic state, in which al perceptions and feelings are destroyed (Szondi 1977, 326-327). In contrast, the shock of mortal danger instigates the startle (reflex) and then, by means of accelerated thought, generates a psychic intensity co-existing

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with diminishing spatio-temporal forms. The intensification of thought and feeling causes the waking consciousness to recede, while the primal drive for participation emerges from the unconscious. Paroxysmal­ participation rather than depersonalization coheres with Noyes' findings as well as Heim's.

III. DESTINY AND THE PRIMAL FORM

In 1944 Carl Jung suffered a heart attack, and he wrote in his autobiography that he "hung on the edge of death and was being given oxygen and camphor injections" (1961, 289). After recovering, his nurse told him that a bright glow bad emanated from him, while clinically dead. Jung said that he had floated up into a space:

Far below I saw the globe of the earth, bathed in a glorious blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outline shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light (289).

Jung entered a temple through a dark chamber and felt that his entire bodily existence was being stripped away in a painful process, leaving the basic care of his life:

This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived. At first the sense of annihilation predominated, of having been stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became of no consequence (291).

Jung considered his life to be a fragment, an excerpt from a story, without beginning and without end. While floating in space, he saw the universe as an artificially constructed three-dimensional box.

From the direction of Europe the image of his physician floated up and delivered a message. He, that is, Jung had to return to earth. Jung resisted the return and, at the same time, worried about his doctor; for once one attains primal form, one (other) must die. The doctor did die a few

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days after Jung's recovery, hut no explanation is given as to why Jung survived, assuming he also attained his primal form.

In the days following his resuscitation Jung alternated between waking and dream consciousness. In his "split-off" phase he floated again into the emptiness of the universe and felt a profound ecstasy. His feelings of beauty were the most intense he had ever experienced, "utterly real; there was nothing subjective about them; they all had a quality of absolute objectivity" (295). He portrays his vision as "the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past, and future are one." Nothing fit into an extensive continuum; everything was one and whole. Jung means individuation or self-realization, which is finished in death. His self-realization was symbolized by his beholding the heavenly wedding in the garden of pomegranates, in Jerusalem, and in a c1assical amphitheatre at the end of a valley surrounded by hills.

Sometime later, Jung wrote in a letter that, during his illness whatever "you do, if you do it sincerely, will eventually become the bridge to your wholeness, a good ship that carries you through the darkness of your second birth, which seems to be death to the outside" (1973,358-359). Here Jung affirms his primal form with the symbol of the bridge.

Two months before his death on June 6, 1961, Jung dreamed of arriving in Bollingen made of gold. Bollingen was the name of the tower that Jung built beside Lake Zürich; he began construction in 1923, the year of his mother's death, and completed it in 1955, the year of his wife's death. Building Bollingen was a part of Jung's grief work. So in the dream, two months before his own death, Jung "held the key to the tower in his hand and a voice told him that the 'tower' was now completed and ready for habitation" (cited in von Franz 1987, 130). This dream reflected the dream he had immediately after completing the tower, in which he saw a replica of the tower standing on the distant shore of the lake.

Taken together, Jung's vision and related dreams clearly illustrate projection and symbolism of shock events. The stripping away of his bodily existence was the start of his projective-participatory mode of being. The strength of the "stripping" might be genotropic, since Jung's biography gives evidence of projective, even schizoform factors. For example, he was a psychiatrist, his maternal grandmother a spiritualist medium, his first cousin a medium, the maternal grandfather a physician and professor, all of which indicating a hereditary tendency toward

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projective expansiveness in decision-making. The ecstasy of the non

temporal state, which he attained, manifests the exaltation of the power of being and pontifical selfhood, as represented himself by the bridge symbol. His participatory state grew out of the shock of the heart attack and exhibited paroxysmal symbolic motifs, such as "floating" high up in space (air), beholding light (fire), seeing the subcontinent of India (earth), and the deep blue sea (water). When he achieved his primal being, he saw his life as a thread of destiny, which is the function of the life review, and the revelation of his destiny took shape as a primal necessity.

IV. ANALYSIS OF THE CORE  “NDE”.

In the generation following the death of Carl Jung his vision came to

be known as a near-death experience. This well-known term, designated NDE, was developed in a popular book by Raymond Moody, who studied 150 near-death cages (1975). That a new term had to be created meant that the classical heritage of visions, which Jung represented, had either been unknown or lost to contemporary American society. After his initial publication, Moody published a more extensive study, based upon one thousand cases, that established the core traits of the NDE: (1) sense of being dead; (2) painless peace despite "painful" experience; (3) bodily separation; (4) entrance into a dark region; (5) rapid rise to the heavens; (6) meeting deceased friends or relatives bathed in light; and (7)  encountering a Supreme Being; (8) the life review; and (9) reluctance to return (1988, 2). These characteristics are taken from accidents, resuscitations from clinical death, and other traumas, such as nonfatal suicide attempts. Moody suggests that one or more of these experiences constitute the NDE.

Moody emphasizes that NDE survivors feel love and peace, lose a fear of death, and gain a new appreciation of knowledge as well as a deeper spirituality. Ironically, with greater wisdom and deeper feeling they may have difficulty interacting with the ordinary social world, following their return from death or unconsciousness. Their difficulty derives from the fact that, while clinically dead, they had "separated" from their physical bodies and discovered a new spiritual "body," in which they became whole, mobile, and complete. The spiritual "body" has neither defect nor handicap. Similarly, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross adds that "amputees had their legs again, those who were in wheelchairs could

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dance and move around without any effort, and blind people could see" (1983, 208). Moody goes on to say that a Supreme Being is encountered as a Being of Light, which is intense but non threatening. Nonverbal communication in the form of telepathy takes place between the Being of Light and the person in the spiritual "body" (Moody 1988, 12).

Telepathy entails a dimension of thought existing independently of sensory-muscular systems. Other investigators support this claim on the grounds that knowledge increases as brain activity decreases and therefore, discloses a transcendental source beyond psychological and physiological causes (Owens, et. al. 1990). Further, a study of the transforming effects of NDE’s, over a span of ten years, finds decreased death anxiety, increased psychic ability, zest for life, and a higher level of intelligence (Morse with Perry 1992, 58-59).

Moody also identifies a life review, which tends to unfold as a third person, three-dimensional, full color panorama. The Being of Light presents the life review, which contains the consequences of the actions committed in one's life, including shameful and evil deeds. The encounter with the Being of Light usually comes after one floats through a long, dark tunnel in the disembodied or spiritual state. As long as one occupies the spiritual "body," one displays a flow pattern of form and energy, in which time is compressed and spatial boundaries surpassed.

To compare the Moody-type NDE with the classical models of Heim and Jung would demonstrate a basic convergence. Moody's discovery of a rapid ascent, telepathy, relativization of space-time, and Being of Light presupposes an acceleration of thought. Throughout NDE accounts acceleration occurs in the out-of-body state, as illustrated in a description of a cardiac arrest:

Almost immediately I saw myself leave my body, coming out through my head and shoulders (I did not see my lower limbs). The "body" leaving me was not exactly in vapor form, yet it seemed to expand very slightly once it was clear of me. It was somewhat transparent, for I could see my other "body" through it. Suddenly I am sitting on a very small object traveling at great speed, out and up into a dull blue-grey sky, at a 45-degree angle (MacMillan and Brown 1982, 48).

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However, unlike Jung, Heim and Moody's patients discovered deceased relatives in the NDE’s. Jung failed to clarify the distinctive familial dimension of the unconscious, and, consequently, clinicians who follow him employ an incomplete model of the unconscious. Since the familial unconscious is omitted in the NDE literature, investigators conceive of deceased relatives as actual entities, whose postmortem existence proves life after death. This seems to be Moody's position, and, as an example, one of his subjects says that, during a difficult labor, she lost consciousness, and heard an annoying hulling, ringing sound. The next thing I knew it seemed as if I were on a ship or a small vessel sailing to the other side of a large body of water. On the distant shore, I could see all of my loved ones who had died -- my mother, my father, my sister, and others. I could see them, could see their faces, just as they were when I knew them on earth. They seemed to be beckoning me to come on over, and all the while I was saying, "no, no, I'm not ready to go" (1975, 74-75).

I interpret the noise in the head as an epileptiform seizure, as would Moody but in another context (1975, 140). The water is a paroxysmal shock symbol, and the sailing is the cross-over archetype. Meeting relatives is the same as encountering their forms in the familial unconscious. The key element is the woman's decision to return, a factor consistent with the familial origin of decision-making.

The issue of the unconscious was raised by Michael Sabom who, when assessing Moody's data, insisted that no medical model of the unconscious had yet been proposed as a verifiable concept (1982, 7). Sabom conceives of the unconscious as a period of time wherein the person loses all subjective awareness of self and environment. This notion closely resembles that of clinical death, a state in which all external signs of consciousness, reflexes, respiration, and cardiac activity are absent, but the organism is not fully dead. Without any medical intervention, within five or six minutes, the organism will proceed on a natural course toward biological death, which is the total and irreversible cessation of all metabolic activity. Under certain conditions clinical death is reversible.

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Sabom essentially confirmed Moody's findings, and he emphasized that with separation from the physical body one becomes an essential self, invisible and nonmaterial. One goes into an autoscopic phase with a sense of timelessness, reality, and death; feelings of peace; and absence of pain. A unique capacity of the essential self is a striking clarity of thought, characterized by acceleration. One subject recalls:

I could have moved away from my body anytime I wanted to.... There wasn't a thing that was mechanical about it, like an automobile or anything. It was just a thought process. I felt like I could have thought myself anywhere I wanted to be instantly. .

I just felt exhilarated with a sense of power (Sabom 1982, 34).

Some of Sabom's subjects went from an earthly environment to a transcendent realm through a dark region or void toward light. In the transcendent region they encounter non-visual presences or visualized spirits, who are deceased relatives or religious figures, with whom verbal, nonverbal, telepathic, or gestural communication takes place. A life review may occur, usually early in the process, prior to a full loss of consciousness (50). The NDE ends with a return to the body, after one has reached a limit.

Sabom's work is analytic and carefully crafted, but the question arises: Is the loss of subjective awareness sufficient for the acquisition of the transcendental experiences? I believe Sabom's data would become more coherent, if his "negative" model of the unconscious were replaced by the tripartite view proposed in chapter two. Non-visual presences or deceased relatives would emanate from the familial unconscious and visualized spirits the collective. Telepathy presumes an expansion of mind beyond the subjective ego and participation in a transpersonal relatedness. Likewise, the life review presupposes the retention of one's actions in an unconscious dimension which exists independently of the vital signs.

Failure of researchers to acknowledge a complete view of the unconscious, particularly the familial, implies a preference for linear and sequential categories. Along with Sabom, Kenneth Ring is credited with verifying Moody's data. Ring sorted out the basic NDE characteristics into a statistically probable stage theory:

(1) affective well-being; (2) separation from the body; (3) immersion in a dark void or tunnel; (4) seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and moving toward it; and (5)

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entering the light (1980, 67-68). Along the way, one could encounter the life review, deceased relatives, and Spiritual Being, before returning to bodily consciousness. Ring emphasizes that deceased relatives encourage the return, for the completion of responsibilities, for example; but the Spiritual Being offers one a choice of returning or not. In contrast, Moody has stated that choice or encouragement could come either from relatives or the Being of Light. Ring also amplifies the life review by adding a flash-forward, instead of a flash-back, precognitive, planetary, and prophetic visions, such as those of impending catastrophes, landmass changes, earthquakes, or war (1984, 183-192). Prophetic visions are rare; but when they happen, they disclose a scenario of cosmic necessity and regeneration.

Ring's stages are consecutive and invariant. His so-called "invariant hypothesis" has been challenged by Bruce Greyson, who posits four distinct categories: cognitive, affective, paranormal, and transcendental (1985, 968). He argues that the nature of the NDE shapes the functional type. For example, when death is not anticipated, as in an accident, then transcendental, affective and cognitive forms co-act with equal frequency.

When death is anticipated, then affective and transcendental forms dominate. Thus, in the expected NDE, cognitive aspects are rare; and these include time distortion, acceleration of thought, and sudden understanding. The implication of Greyson's argument is that NDE’s have diverse origins without consecutive stages.

When viewed together, Greyson's and Ring's theories pose a subject- object dichotomy, respectively. Greyson introduces a subjectivist bias, when making thought acceleration and time distortion cognitive features.

Ring presumes the reality of the object in proposing a linear model. The emerging conclusion of this chapter is that thought acceleration derives from fundamental reality, in which subject-object, space-time forms are relativized. Disclosure of fundamental reality occurs in an epileptiform shock event that dissolves such distinctions as cognition and affect.

NEGATIVE  NDE’s

All investigators acknowledge that not everyone who comes close to death has the NDE. A recent study has estimated about 40-45% of persons have one (Brooks 1991, 22). Obviously, this raises questions about the other 60-55 %. One explanation is that persons who do not go far enough toward death lack the NDE, because the experience is a

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memory, created "on the way back," by patients attempting to make sense of the crisis (Kastenbaum 1991, 323). Upon recovering, they are able to integrate the feelings with a narrative recollection. This argument presupposes the Freudian model of the psyche, according to which one recollects the trauma, overcomes resistance, and works it through with feelings and symbolic forms. To explore this line of thought I draw upon a case study, conducted by one of my students, who is an experienced emergency medical paramedic. On the night of February 9, 1991, he was called to the home of a 26 year old, married woman, mother of two sons. She was "pale, breathless, and without a pulse," in a state of ventricular fibrillation, a form of clinical death. After defibrillation and intravenous treatment, she was taken to a hospital, where a defibrillation system was surgically implanted. Throughout the paramedic process, she received oxygen therapy.

When speaking with the woman later, the paramedic learned that she had no memory from one and one half days before the trauma until six or seven days after resuscitation. While in the hospital, family members observed swelling in her face. The paramedic interpreted the swelling to mean increased carbon dioxide and decreased oxygen levels. Since paramedics needed almost six minutes to reach her home, this cerebral anoxia might have blocked the short term memory.

Nevertheless, the victim has had a recurrent dream, coming regularly long after her cardiac arrest. She dreams of herself lying in a hospital bed with nurses and doctors around her. They appear to be talking to her; however, she is unable to interpret or respond back to them, while at the same time the nurses and doctors are performing acts of patient care.

The dream seems to be an accurate recollection of the hospital setting; yet when asked to recall what happened, she described darkness, loneliness, and an increased fear of death. Despite this negative image, she acquired a heightened spirituality and zest for life, which belong to NDE’s. She began to work for the Ladies Auxiliary of the fire department, Little League World Series, and Read Start.

Except for her new intensity, this woman does not precisely exhibit the traits of the NDE. Psychoanalytically, the woman gets a narrative recollection "on the way back" but fails to work through the trauma, due

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to a persistent fear of death as darkness and loneliness. Instead of imposing a backward-forward sequential model, it would be more appropriate to make a threshold analysis, as with death-bed visions. The woman's recollection does not achieve wholeness, because she fails to resolve some type of conflict, probably in her family relationships.

So-called negative NDE’s are reported in the literature occasionally, and, as an example, Robert Kastenbaum quotes one survivor of an automobile accident:

I was thrilled to meet this person or was it an angel--and then all at once I saw that she or it was truly horrible. Where the eyes were supposed to be were slits and kind of blue-green flames flickered through them, through the eye-places. I can still see this demon, this whatever-it-was. With my eyes wide open, I can still see it (1991, 322).

A pioneering study describes negative NDE’s as dominated by fear and anguish, with out-of-body states, movement through a dark tunnel or void, being of light, judgment of past deeds, and meeting deceased acquaintances. However, the movement through the tunnel has a downward trajectory, and the transcendent environment is hellish, dark, misty, with a cave or lake of fire, and demonic beings (Irwin and Bramwell 1988, 38-40).

To illustrate, the authors describe an automobile accident, in which the driver, a 50 year old woman, is lifted up to a high place and goes through a tunnel to a field of light. She sees a church in the distance; so she walks toward it and enters through the front door. Inside the sanctuary people are wearing black robes and red hoods. She advances toward the altar, on top of which stands a silver jug and six silver goblets.

I stood there wondering where I was and what I was doing there, when a door opened to the right of the altar and out came the devil. He came over to the altar, looked me straight in the eye and told me to pick up a goblet. I picked up a goblet and he picked up the big silver jug and started pouring. I saw that what he was pouring from the jug was fire, and I screamed, dropped the goblet and started to run. I just ran and ran. I didn't know where I was running to. And then I saw a big fence, a stone

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fence and the gates opened and I passed through. Then I came to another fence made out of iron bars, and that just opened, and again I ran through. All the time I was getting warmer and warmer and brighter and brighter (42).

The experience ended, when she awakened in a hospital room. These two cases exhibit fire, a figure of evil, and fear. The authors generalize from the second that the NDE is a holistic event with contrasting phases. They oppose the notion that different NDE’s have diverse origins. In my view, they are correct, and their interpretation may be amplified by reconsidering paroxysmal symbolism. Fire represents pent-up Cain affects, and the devil archetype indicates that the anger, rage or resentment lack restitution. Running away is a hysteroid reaction, a fear growing out of the pent-up anger, and the opening of the doors is an attempt to work the anger through the hierarchical layers of the brain-mind system. Getting warmer and warmer means the build up of the affect to an epileptiform seizure. In both cases pent-up emotion indicates unresolved conflict and the failure to achieve integration, transcendence, and participation.

VI. PEDIATRIC NDE’S

The current search to understand NDE’s includes those of children, who are relatively free of cultural conditioning and who offer the possibility of a pure experience. Generally, pediatric NDE’s are like those of adults, except that they omit a life review due to their short life span. Children tend to discover loving beings, specifically next of kin, who have preceded them in death.

One child who was almost lost during very critical heart surgery shared with her father that she was met by a brother with whom she felt so comfortable; it was as if they had known each other and shared each other's lives. Yet, she had never had a brother. Her father was very moved by his daughter's account and confesses that she did have a brother, but he had died before she was born (Kübler-Ross, 1983, 208).

This case illustrates how the NDE penetrates the familial unconscious, existing at a deeper level than the personal unconscious.

The familial unconscious is the medium through which siblings are  reciprocally attracted to each other by means of genotropism.

Genotropism operates in the death state by virtue of the fact that relationships survive death and are preserved unconsciously in the family. The case material even includes family pets in the pediatric NDE’s. One investigator describes the drowning of an eight year old boy, who separates from his body and proceeds through a tunnel toward a light. He has no life review, and time stops in the tunnel. He turns right and discovers two family pets: a Springer spaniel, who had died when the boy was three, and a deceased cat. They lick the boy's face, and then he pets them (Serdahely 1989-1990, 59). The NDE ends, when the boy awakens in a hospital.

In a subsequent publication the same investigator reports the case of a young girl, clinically dead for thirty seconds. She enters a dark region in a peaceful, painless state, when a lamb approaches, comes close, and then runs away (Serdahely 1990, 249-250). The lamb had also been a deceased pet. Psychoanalysts would interpret these encounters in terms of transference. The Being of Light is a transference of the love of the father in a protective manner. The transference satisfies the need to deny death and allow the triumph of infantile omnipotence. In the two cases cited above the pets substitute for the parents, but the projected need remains the same. Further, the out -of-body state is an uncoupling of the mental ego from the bodily ego. The former splits off and observes the latter (Gabbard and Twemlow 1984, 160,238). This position rests upon a philosophical monism, according to which the physical and psychological processes are identical. Hence, the so-called splitting of the egoes is only a matter of perspective and not a real separation, because nothing exists outside the brain. However, the author of the pet studies reports the mother of the eight year old boy had a premonition of his fall and that throughout his unconscious state; she spoke to him in a loving manner. Her premonition posits clairvoyance at a distance with translocal and transcausal relatedness. Since the boy could hear his mother and his father speaking, while unconscious, he maintained a level of awareness independent of the comatose brain. These facts refute a monism and transpersonal state of being with a reciprocal family participation.

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Meeting deceased pets indicates that the death state activates the need for attachment. Pets are familiar beings and, as such, belong to the background self. Szondi defines the background self psychologically and biologically, but he does not restrict it to the same species (1977, 234).

As long as pets satisfy the need for attachment through contact-bonding, then their relatedness could be preserved unconsciously. The decisive insight of the pet cases is that instinctual drive material operates during clinical death. Szondi derives the need for attachment from the contact drive (1963, 479).

A definitive analysis of childhood NDE’s comes out of the work of Melvin Morse. He conducted a study of 121 children, who were intubated or attached to artificial lung machines, thus ruling out anoxia as a cause. Nearly all of his children, as well as 25 % of adults, see the light (Morse with Perry 1990, 115). Light normally appears after bodily separation and travel through the tunnel. The light is a warm, caring, wrap-around presence that is not confined to the boundaries of the body.

If the light was exclusively physiological and eyesight was to cease, Morse argues, then darkness ought to appear. Instead, light dawns in death, and so it cannot be derived from "spasm of rigor mortis in the optic nerve" (133). The light radiates life-giving, transforming qualities, and it even extends beyond physical boundaries of the body. Thus, light cannot be reduced psychoanalytically to a transference of the father's love.

Morse describes a child, who fell overboard from a boat into the dark murky waters of Puget Sound in Washington. Her father jumped into the water and made several surface dives in an attempt to recover her. Because the water was so dark, he could not see her. After diving unsuccessfully, he finally saw a light in the depths of the waters. He swam toward the light and saw that his daughter's limp body was emitting it. He grabbed her and took her to the surface, where she was rescued. Hence, at the point of death the light shone in the darkness' of the waters.

Morse's cases reveal that the light takes a symbolic form, particularly the cross-over archetype. For example, six year old Daniel was hit by a car.

He left his body, traveled down a dark tunnel to the light, where he saw three men, behind whom was a rainbow bridge that stretched across the sky" (40). The boy did not go with the three men, because he wished to return to his parents.

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Seven year old Cary was dying of leukemia. He moved up on a beam of light to heaven, crossed over a rainbow bridge, and visited a crystal castle (53). God told him that he would die at a specific time, and this prediction turned out to be correct.

VII. EXPLANATIONS OF SEIZURES

One of the significant aspects of Morse' s work is his claim to have discovered the neurological cause of the NDE. The right temporal lobe of the brain contains a genetically coded program for the NDE, which operates in the shock of mortal danger (100). In a subsequent study he explains that everything but the light may be located physiologically in the brain (Morse with Perry 1992, 67). The light shines only in death, and the energy of the light flows into the organism through the right  temporal lobe, where it comes to a peak, releases energy, and even radiates outside the body. The build up and release of light through the organism causes the most profound transformations, including the clinically observed decrease of anxiety and increase of paranormal psychic ability, involving telepathy and precognitive dreams. Morse documents the fact that survivors of NDE’s have four times as many psychic experiences as non-NDEers (89). Ironically, 25% of adult NDE survivors stop wearing watches, simply because they cease working (132). Morse speculates that discharge of light in the NDE changes the electromagnetic forces in the cells and body; and these energy forces effect the watches. Morse' s conclusion bears upon the modern scientific study of epilepsy; for to locate the NDE in the right temporal lobe is to establish a neurological relationship with temporal lobe epilepsy. Demonstrating that the light cannot be located means that the NDE opens up the brain to a transcendent reality. Morse's description of the build up and discharge of light parallels the accumulation and explosion of affect in temporal lobe epilepsy, including the Dostoevsky aura. The factor which connects the NDE and temporal lobe epilepsy is the paroxysmal pattern, as described by Szondi but unknown in American clinical circles.

The relationship between epilepsy and the NDE has been discussed by other investigators, whose work should be examined because they all make differing philosophical assumptions. First, the neurologist Michael. Persinger claims that temporal lobe epilepsy and NDE’s are variants of a general continuum of psychic seizures. The temporal lobe region

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comprises projection, visual imagery, hearing, vestibular movements, and sensations of balance, all of which are found in epilepsy and NDE’s. Even Moody connects projections to migraines and epilepsy (1988, 124).

Persinger cites the following NDE case:
Suddenly I felt myself being lifted up, like the movement in an elevator. I felt like I was moving down a long corridor-I could see my body slowly moving away from "me." I was spinning around and around in the soft darkness. Then I stopped, it was like floating. At first I felt terror, then I heard a voice and all the fear left. The voice said, "Go back; it's not your time," and I knew it was God, I did not want to return; the feeling of infinite peace was all around me and I hated to return to the pain of my life (Persinger 1987, 26-27).

Persinger points out that the sensations of "being lifted up," "floating," "moving," "hearing a voice," and "infinite peace," belong to the temporal lobe seizure syndromne. Absent from the example are the light and meeting deceased relatives, neither of which can be fully explained neurologically. Persinger interprets the NDE as depersonalization caused by instability in the temporal lobe. As argued in section two, this concept does not fully account for the rich feelings and perceptions of the NDE. Persinger's use of the notion depersonalization betrays his philosophical commitment to an, epiphenomal monism, which affirms the primacy of physical reality, derivative status of mind, and the brain as a closed system.

Second, Morse grounds his study in a philosophical dualism, when he posits a soul independent of brain issues but disclosed through the  genetically coded neural circuits (1990, 108). He draws upon the work Wilder Penfield, who electrically stimulated his patients' right temporal lobe, in the "Sylvian fissure," producing out-of-body states, music, life review, deceased persons, and presence of God. Morse does not assign exclusive priority to the right temporal lobe reactions but to a nonmaterial soul, capable of surviving biological death. However, it is not clear how the independent soul relates to the effects of the electrical stimulation of the brain, which Morse cites in Penfield's work.

Likewise, Michael Sabom appeals to Penfield's work and also frames the NDE in a dualism. Sabom summarizes the characteristics of temporal lobe epilepsy, as established by Penfield: (1) sensory illusions;

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(2) feelings of fear, sadness, or loneliness; (3) visual and auditory hallucinations; and (4) forced thinking or crowding of random ideas (1982, 173-174). Assuming these to be definitive of epilepsy, Sabom contrasts them with NDE traits: (1) undistorted perception of the environment; (2) pervasive calm, peace, and joy; (3) absence of taste and smell; (4) life review, comprising a succession of several meaningful elements instead of a single, random event; and (5) absence of forced thinking (174). Sabom concludes that the NDE is not identical to epilepsy, but it involves a psychic mechanism that separates from the body and exists independently of the brain.

Sabom illustrates the contrast between epilepsy and the NDE with two cases. The first involves a "severe infectious illness and grand mal seizure at age fifteen," as recalled by a 73 year old woman:

Then I became separated and I was sitting way up there looking at myself convulsing and my mother and my maid screaming and yelling because they thought I was dead. I felt so sorry for them and for my body….. Just deep, deep sadness. I can still feel the sadness. But I felt I was free up there and there was no reason for suffering. I had no pain and was completely free (20).

This case clearly contradicts the claim, cited above, that epilepsy has visual hallucinations and distorted thought. The sadness derives from a clear perception of the reactions of the mother and maid, but it is overcome by painlessness and freedom. As with the Dostoevsky aura the conquest of suffering is predominate, so that any conceptual distinction between epilepsy and the NDE collapses.

Secondly, Sabom describes "a grand mal seizure associated with severe toxemia of pregnancy" in a 20 year old woman:

I knew something was going to happen.. .and then I went unconscious.. and I was looking down and could see myself going into convulsions, and I was starting to fall out of bed, and the girl in the next bed screaming for the nurses.The nurse caught me and put me back and by then there were two other nurses there and one came back almost immediately with a tongue depressor on my tongue. And they got the sides up on the bed and they called the doctor

It was a feeling of height, great distance, a light feeling like being up in a balcony looking

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down and watching all this and feeling very detached as though I was watching someone else, like you might watch a movie....

It was a very calm, relaxed feeling, a feeling of well-being if anything.. .(29-30).

This case also contradicts Sabom's claim of sensory distortion and fear in the epileptic seizure. It clearly illustrates the paroxysmal symbolic motif of height, as well as the stripping away of the body in projective­ participatory being, and the sense of peace in the Dostoevsky aura.

Although Sabom intends to separate NDE’s and epilepsy sharply, his own cases do not support the distinction. The characteristics of epilepsy, cited by Sabom may be attributed to complex partial seizures, but they do not correspond to the profound knowledge of epilepsy achieved by the asylum doctors. Nowhere is the Dostoevsky aura considered in the discussion of epilepsy. Dostoevsky discovered that the sublime ecstasy of the aura made distinctions of normal and abnormal irrelevant. Yet he also discovered the fundamental polarity of epilepsy, joy balanced by mystic terror, light by darkness, peace by guilt and the dread of punishment. Dostoevsky knew that mystic terror was the condition to behold the light, because the goal of the seizure was to manifest restitution.

It is not my intent to identify epilepsy and the NDE but to derive them from the paroxysmal pattern, including its polarity of Cain and Abel tendencies. Grounding these phenomena in the paroxysmal pattern shows that they are governed by the basic need for atonement in the face of death.

Appealing to the paroxysmal pattern illumines the fact that negative NDE’s fail to achieve restitution, a factor inhibiting participation in fundamental, transcendent reality.

Monism and dualism are simply inadequate explanations for the radiant shock of death-related events. Monism presumes the primacy of physical objective reality, and dualism uncritically retains a dogmatic conception of death as a separation of soul and body. Despite the aid of medical technology, investigators employ questionable philosophical assumptions uncritically. Uncritical thought is further characterized by the absence of historical scholarship in the NDE literature. When viewed historically, it becomes apparent that the insights of Albert Heim in the nineteenth century remain fundamental and still unintegrated in current discussions.

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VIII. MIND AS ACT

In the remainder of this chapter I sketch a theory of the NDE with reference to the foregoing clinical and metaphysical issues. My proposed theory also embraces the dreams and visions of death and grief. A general theory of these phenomena should abandon a view of reality as exhaustively physical, objective, sequential, and locomotive. Such a theory should also give up the attempt to locate mind as an entity, capable of separating from the bodily brain. The conception of mind as entity carries on the older notion of soul as entity as well.

I propose to conceive of mind as act. The principal reason is to explain the primary datum of shock events, namely, acceleration of thought. The classical theory of mind as act was formulated by Susanne Langer, who assumed with Alfred North Whitehead that events are the basic constituents of nature. Within every domain of the universe the act informs all movements and elements. The act is an indivisible whole, consisting of an initial moment, acceleration, consummation, and dosing phase (Langer 1967, 291). The potential for the act is the impulse, which is a tendency toward completion. Acts are not isolated events but moments in a series, which unfold in flow patterns characterized by regularity and probability. Acts relate with one  another in diverse patterns of interacting. Interacting patterns exhibit contraries and alternates, which appeal in rhythms. The various regions of the universe have specific forms of rhythmic interacting. When conceived as a whole, the universe appears to be a vast ocean of wave-like patterns of ebb and flow, undulating forces of energy and mass.

Human life is distinguished by the advanced evolution of feeling, which provides for the specialization of thought through form and imagination. Mind as act comprises feeling and imaginal form. Just as the act rises to a consummation before ending, so, in the same way, feelings need to be completed in imaginal forms (Langer 1972, 285). In this way acts of thought may be felt as well as remembered.

The philosophy of mind as act accounts for current neurobiological models. Contemporary neurology identifies the neuron as the discrete functional unit of the brain. The neuron is a cell with an electrical element and membrane boundary, functioning as an action potential that produces phases of excitation and inhibition. Altogether, the brain comprises billions of individual neurons, each of which releases its own energy in pulsating rhythms of coming into being and passing away.

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Consciousness is the wave-like pattern that emerges in the instantaneous firings of the billions of neurons. The flow of consciousness includes the rhythm of neural excitation and inhibition. The phase of excitation generates feeling and form according to the paroxysmal pattern, as it applies both to dreams and to epileptic seizures.

Langer's definition of the act conforms precisely to Szondi's conception of paroxysmality. The paroxysmal excitation of the brain coincides with acceleration of thought amid shock events. Since the concept of act informs thought fundamentally, then the entitative notions of brain and mind are derivative. To conceptualize events in terms of brain and mind as entities puts the issues on a secondary level of reflection. Consequently, monism and dualism are equally derivative and beside the point. Because acting is relating and relating is rhythmic, there is no need to distinguish the physical from the psychological aspects of the brain. Functions in the brain are themselves derivative from the wave-like rhythms of feeling and form.

In the shock of mortal danger the paroxysmal excitatory function of the brain dominates while sensory-muscular systems and pain stimuli are inhibited. The startle network is the starter, igniting thought to accelerate. The shock accelerates thought to such an intensity that the order of space and time, extension and succession recedes. The dynamics of thought acceleration have been suggested in a letter by Carl Jung:

It might be that the psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not as a body moving with time. One might assume the psyche gradually arising from minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body… (1975,45)

Here Jung understands the brain as a transformer station, in which the intensity of mind turns into perceptible frequencies or extensions. This is a helpful idea, and I would add that the ego phases, such as projection and introjection are also grounded in the frequencies. My explanation of thought-acceleration correlates with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. When systems are accelerated from rest, they cannot be accelerated beyond the speed of light. This postulate excludes those systems, in which particles do not accelerate but move at the speed of light as soon as they exist, such as neutrinos and photons.

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Einstein's postulate does not exclude tachyons or supraluminal particles, even though they may not be confirmed experimentally. Nevertheless, a rod accelerating up to the speed of light would disappear, and a clock, moving at the same velocity, would become slower and eventually stop when reaching the speed of light.

By analogy, when thought accelerates to a higher-level intensity, it  becomes luminous, approaching the speed of light, as it were. Since the speed of light is not an absolute limit, the possibility of supraluminous intensity remains open for radiant forms of dream, vision, and telepathy.

As thought accelerates, simultaneously, spatial extension vanishes, and temporal succession slows down to a point. The body is no longer felt, because its form has been transcended; thus, the light that radiates in the NDE is the accelerated intensity of thought itself.

Through the acceleration of thought, the radiant shock of death reveals fundamental reality. In current cosmology the universe is understood as a flowing, indivisible whole of energy, which may be symbolized by a vast ocean (Bohm 1980, 210). The same symbol appears in the thought of Frederic Myers, William James, and Carl Jung. All life arises from the cosmic sea of energy. Local space-time regions shape the order of daily life, but they are derivative and dissolve into the oceanic background of energy at death. Location is a limited and abstract representation of a region but not fundamental. When humans confront the threat of death, their thought processes accelerate to luminous intensities and change into their essential and unextended beings. Having ignited the paroxysmal pattern the shock of death culminates the primal drive for participation in social and metaphysical reality.

IX. ARCHETYPICAL PARTICIPATION

When Raymond Moody published his original NDE case studies, he suggested parallels between them and the history of religions, particularly the Bible, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg (1975,111-128). These citations are not stated on the basis of critical scholarship, but they do suggest the cross-cultural experience of the light. The cumulative research findings, conducted since Moody's initial publication, also confirm the primacy of light in the NDE.

Appropriately, Moody's suggestions stimulated scholars to find historical parallels to the NDE. One of the most definitive works is

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Carol Zaleski's study, claiming that the NDE is the current version of the classical otherworld journey (1987). She argues that the otherworld journey of the ancient Shaman is the prototype and that it is associated with initiatory death and rebirth rituals. She illustrates her argument with the classical Christian otherworld journey, which comprises the following stages: (1) exit from the body; (2) encounter with a spiritual guide or gate keeper; (3) travel to heaven, purgatory, or hell; (4) confronting obstacles (e.g. fire, mountains), test bridge, and weighing of deeds; (5) followed by re-entry, with a command to return, personal transformation, and narrative recollection of the event (45-77). She interprets the otherworld journey as a form of imagination, intended to maintain a mythic model of the cosmos and to offer guidance to people during cultural crises (192-204).

/ By comparing the Moody type NDE to the classical Christian otherworld journey, Zaleski demonstrates convincingly that diverse symbols shape the phenomena in different cultural periods. For example, the older type has the two deaths motif, according to which an easy exit from the body signifies a saintly character, but agony denotes a sinner. The current version has only a pleasant exit. The older form features a hierarchy of being, reflecting the stratification of Medieval society. In the current model everyone is equal. Whereas in the older type, persons receive commands; in the newer one people are given choices whether to live or to die.

While Zaleski's book deals mainly with Western Christian civilization, an earlier study grounded the NDE in four archetypes of the history of religions: (1) One enters an out-of-body state and becomes a spiritual body, inaudible, invisible, and nonmaterial. In this essential being one floats or hovers over the corpse. (2) One meets deceased relatives or friends. (3) The meeting coincides with the encounter of a border, limit, or dividing line toward which one crosses over the water by means of a boat, bridge, or rainbow. (4) One beholds the light (Holck 1978-1979).

In my view, the Holck study rather than the Zaleski comes first in the order of historical priorities. The Holck paper identifies the cross­over pattern, which, as archeology demonstrates, is an archaic archetype derived from the perceived cyc1e of the sun. In the primeval imagination the sun moved across the sky to the Western horizon before descending below the earth to begin the otherworld journey (Lauf 1980, 89-91). Journey as descent preceded that of ascent, which informs the Zaleski

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and Moody types. The otherworld journey as an ascent informed ancient Greco-Roman culture, whereas that of descent occurred in the ancient Near East.

The four primordial archetypes, identified by the Holck study, reflect the basic paroxysmal shock symbols. The motif of crossing over to a border or floating through a tunnel represents the archetype of water. Radiant light is an expression of fire. The darkness of the tunnel or void signifies an epileptiform loss of consciousness in the sense of "blacking out." The transition from darkness to light is also epileptiform, and it signifies a shift from an unconscious to a transpersonal state. The Dostoevsky aura is the standard. Meeting deceased relatives and friends is not so much archetypal as genotropic and familial. Friends are gene relatives who, along with blood relatives, occupy the familial unconscious. In the Moody type of NDE the relatives are bathed in light, which means that the ancestors dwell in the supraluminous threshold of accelerated thought forms. The ancestors attain in death an unextended psychic intensity, the forms of which are preserved in the generations of the family. These. ancestral forms enter the dreams and visions of descendants, in accord with the biological principle that organisms strive to perpetuate their genes in subsequent generations.

It is well-known that Moody personalizes the Being of Light and defines it theologically as God, Christ, or angel (1975, 59). Naming the Being of Light as divine is intended to support his contention of parallels between the Bible and the NDE (112-113). However, designating the Being of Light as God is a theological judgment that surpasses the boundaries of clinical methodology. It is questionable with respect to the biblical tradition, which assigns priority to darkness, an issue to be explored further in chapter seven.

In contrast to Moody's opinion, I suggest that the Being of Light manifests the pontifical ego or participatory selfhood. Since the light emanates from the tunnel, which derives from the archaic cross-over pattern, then the most precise historical parallel would be the Persian Chinvat Bridge, on which the deceased discovers his or her destiny as a radiant being of light (Daena). The Being of Light, discovered on the bridge or its equivalents, is one's own primal form, projected as a radiant intensity, culminating the acceleration of thought, and creating participation in fundamental metaphysical reality.

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To illustrate the relation between the bridge and the light, a case reported by a nurse and cardiologist is considered. The nurse was a former student of mine who took care of an 81 year old male. He sustained an extensive myocardial infarction and was admitted to a coronary care unit. While there, he suffered two nonfatal cardiac arrests, the first lasting 32 seconds and the second 23. In each instance he left his body with the knowledge of his own death and traveled on a beam of light:

Ahead of him, the beam stretched to infinity, at what appeared to be a forty-five degree angle and was aimed upward. On each side of the beam was a dark abyss. As he moved with the beam of light, he described sensing the most beautiful colors imaginable which were present in the beam of light, but were unlike colors on earth.

Accompanying the light was an "eerie" sound, and he described the sound as a whistling sound, as if it were possible to hear the speed of light. He stated that he did not encounter any people and did not hear any voices, only this eerie, rushing sound.

For this man, who "died" twice, the light unfolded as a rainbow bridge, spanning a dark unconscious abyss. The uncanny sound echoed the shock of his own psyche accelerating into luminous archetypal form. In two NDE’s he became a radiant being, with exalted participatory power, beyond unfathomable waters of the cosmic sea.

CHAPTER SEVEN: DEATH, MOURNING, AND REJOICING

I. LAND OF NO RETURN

Beginning with this chapter our study of death as a shock event turns to the theological sources, specifically, to the Bible. Generally, the ancient Hebrews conceived of death as a dissolution of the whole human being, a draining of its vitality, and a scattering of its power (Silberman 1969, 19-20). Life was conceived as a whole, and its vital power extended from the individual to the community, offspring, and property. Death was a breaking of this extensive continuum but not extinction. Death was not so much a separation event but a variety of states of powerlessness or weakness. If the body were struck down by a traumatic force, some vitality could persist in scattered parts of the whole. If death were by murder, then the vital fragments would evoke the need for retribution.

Before the fall of Samaria, in 722-721 B.c.E. the Hebrews considered death to be the natural end of the life span, under the following conditions: (1) the deceased had lived a normal span of time (Gen. 6:3, 120 years; Ps. 90: 10, 70 years); (2) had left behind children for mourning and remembrance; and (3) had been buried in a grave to prevent vengeance by the corpse and disruption of the order of the world (Jacob 1962, 802). Normally, burial took place in a rock-cut, chamber tomb, belonging to the family of the deceased.

Abraham represented this natural type of death; he lived 175 years. and was "buried in a good old age" (Gen. 15: 15; 25:7), as did Job, who died" old and full of days" (Jb. 42: 17). The phrase "gathered to your kin" also designated a natural death, and it referred to national leaders

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like Moses and Aaron (Deut. 32:50). The phrase "to sleep with one's ancestors" indicated the natural death of kings, primarily in the books of Kings (I Kgs. 14:20; 15:24; 22:40, 50) and Chronic1es (II Chron. 9:31; 12: 16; 16: 13; 27:9). Likewise, the phrases "to lie down in death" and "lying in the grave" meant a natural death. That these phrases are indirect verbal statements implies the Hebrew belief that dying was involuntary. The Hebrews imagined the dead occupying a region below the earth  called Sheol, an underground pit, where all the individual graves intersected. The idea of Sheol was inferred from burial practice, and it coincided with the earliest conception of a "beyond" in the Old  estament (Tromp 1969, 23).

Sheol could be regarded as an unconscious realm that erupts into life, as long as this idea were not hypostatized as "the Unconscious." In any case, Sheol would conform to the notion of the familial unconscious, in as much as burial meant joining the ancestors. The Hebrews thought of death in relation to their neighbors, particularly the Canaanites, who conceived of the underworld as a city, whose name meant "pit" or "abyss" in Ugaritic and Hebrew cognates (Astour 1980, 229). The underground city was ruled by Mot, the Canaanite god of death and a voracious monster with large dangerous jaws that extend from the earth to the heavens and the stars. Mot has lips and tongue, throat, stomach and limbs; he is a personal, demonic being who rises up from the underground to swallow the living violently. Thus, Canaanite mythology projects the image of death as killing and eating. Although Sheol resembled Hmry, the Hebrews could not assimilate 'entirely the Canaanite mythology of death. The Hebrews' settlement in

Palestine, where they met the Canaanites, was governed by the Mosaic prohibition of other gods (Ex. 20:3-4). Since no other gods were permissible in Israel, the Hebrews "broke" the mythology of death but retained some of its shock-images. Various Canaanite images were grafted onto the notion of Sheol enabling the people to face realistically the eruptive horror of death. Some of the richest images of Sheol are found in the Psalms and the book of Job. Sheollies in "the depths of the earth," which is balanced by "the heights of the mountains" (Ps. 95:4). Since the roots of the  mountains penetrate the earth, they shake with God's anger: "The foundations also of the mountains trembled and quaked, because he was

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angry. Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth; glowing coals flamed forth from him" (Ps. 18:76-78). Sheol contains many pits, into which the wicked fall, when hit by burning coals (Ps. 140: 10). To die is to go "down into the depths" (Ps. 107:26a). The notion of depth emphasizes the unbridgeable gulf between the living and the dead. Sinking into the depths also accounts for any weakness, suffering, sickness, or distress. Weakness is like falling, being dragged down to low or distant places. These images of "going down" and "falling" are paroxysmal conceptions of death as a shock-event. Many of the images of death entail the shock symbol of the earth. Job says of the dead: "Hide them all in the dust together, bind their faces in the world below" (40:13). Hiding faces means to suppress their personalities. Similarly, Isaiah proclaims:

"Then deep from the earth you shall speak, from low in the dust your words shall come; your voice shall come from the ground like the voice of a ghost, and your speech shall whisper out of the dust" (29:4).

Generally, the Old Testament distinguishes between earth, ground, and dust. In the Creation Narrative dust signifies transistorizes; for after Adam eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, God declares: "You are dust and to dust you shall return" (Gen. 3:19b). Earth lies beneath the "dust of the ground" (Adamah), from which the man (Adam) has been created (Gen. 2:7a). Terms for the ground and man are related, the former feminine and the latter masculine. The divine breath or spirit flows from the man into the ground and binds them into a unity. The bond is broken, however, when Cain murders his brother Abel.

The ground "opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand" (Gen. 4:11). The blood flows out of the corpse into the ground, rupturing the primal bond and poisoning the earth. The image of the ground swallowing Abel's blood reflects the Canaanite myth of the devouring jaws of Mot. Thereafter, death remains the "Hungry one” of the desert. Job explains that their "strength is consumed by hunger, and calamity is ready for their stumbling. By disease their skin is consumed, the firstborn of Death consumes their limbs" (18:12-13). Anyone who is so consumed becomes a mythic son of Mot. The Creation Narrative also employs the shock symbol of water, as it relates to Sheol. "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters"

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(Gen. 1: 1-2). Here the primeval ocean (Tehom) is supported by the massive earth yet encircles it; and its waves surge with elemental force always ready to threaten chaos (Tromp 1969,44, 59, 61). The primeval ocean has a subterranean connection with Sheol: "For the waves of death encompassed me, the torrents of perdition assailed me; the cords of Sheol entangled me, the snares of death confronted me" (II Sam. 22:5-6).

Still other passages combine elements of earth and water to imagine the terror of Sheol. The desolate pit contains watery sands, quicksand, and a "miry bog" (Ps. 40:2). The pit is like a muddy cistern (Jer. 38:6). Sinking into the muddy waters conceals the dead from the face of God (Ps. 143:7) and traps them behind prison bars (Jon. 2:6). The miry bog and muddy waters destroy all hope; for they lie in the deepest place, an unfathomable abyss, falling into which brings only ruin and destruction.

The eruptive force of the abyss is well expressed in Psalm 124, where death as the savage enemy would "swallow us up alive" (v. 3), "flood would have swept us away" (v. 4), "given us as prey to their teeth" (v. 6), and "the snare of the fowlers" (v. 7). Hidden in the muddy waters, miry bog, or desolate pit, death lurks ever ready to seize, strike, and slay.

Behind the oldest texts, an archaic cosmology links Sheol with the desert, the ocean, and the night as the zones of death (Pedersen 1926, 458-459). The desert is the place of death due to the loss of fertility in the ground, after the murder of Abel, and it is indistinguishable from the wilderness: "my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water" (Ps. 63:1b). However, the Old Testament does not equate death with the desert exclusively, because Sheol is mainly a watery place with channels to the primeval ocean.

Several passages in Job view Sheol as night or darkness: "before I go, never to return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos, where light is like darkness" (10:21-22); "they are thrust from light into darkness and driven out of the world" (18: 18); "they despair of returning from darkness" (15:22); and he "has set darkness upon my paths" (19:8b).

Sheol has two mountains standing at the border, where a river flows along a border. To die is to cross the river. Job declares the river to be a place of judgment: "that he may turn them aside from their deeds, and keep them from pride, to spare their souls from the Pit, their lives from

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traversing the River" (33:17-18). Since the river is absent in Canaanite Mythology, Job's description reflects the influence of Mesopotamian thought. In Mesopotamian mythology the river is called Hubur. It flows at the edge of the earth, at the Western horizon, which is reached after crossing a vagt, barren desert. The water of Hubur encircles the earth and separates this world from the dark shores of the beyond. Those shores are so distant, so poorly discerned, that one does not know whether they be above or below the primeval ocean (Bottero 1980, 31­-32).

In Mesopotamian mythology the dead cross the river Hubur and, once going beyond the dismal banks of water, they enter the land of no return. Beyond the frontier the dead find an immense, muddy, obscure cavern, where they dwell in darkness, immobility, and silence. The context is essentially the same in the Old Testament wherein, upon burial, the dead cross the river, which is like an underground tunnel, and are forgotten. For "there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going" (Eccles. 9: 10). God's face is hidden from those in the land of forgetfulness (Ps. 88: 12, 14). The dead have neither joy nor possessions (Jb. 15:29). The dead dwell in the land of no return: "Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me" (II Sam. 12:23).

II. DESCENT TO SHEOL AND MOURNING

The various images of Sheol in the Old Testament coalesce into the paroxysmal symbolic motif of descent. In the Bible and the ancient Near East the image of descent corresponded to prescribed rituals of mourning. Thus, Sheol refers not only to the underground pit but also to grief. The mythic image projects what the community acts out ritually. The same ritual context appears in Canaanite mythology, when Mot slays his brother Baal the god of fertility. El, the Supreme god and father of Baal and Mot, begins to grieve:

Then El the kind, the compassionate:
descends from the throne and sits on the footstool, from the footstool and [descends and] sits upon the ground. He strews stalks of mourning on his head,

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the dust in which he wallows on his pate. His clothing he tears, down to the loin cloth, his skin he bruises with a rock by pounding, with a razor he cuts his beard and whiskers, He rakes his upper arms, he plows his breast like a garden, like a valley he rakes his chest. He raises his voice and shouts: Baal is dead: What will happen to the people? Dogon's son: What will happen to the masses? I am descending to the underworld, after Baal" (Anderson 1991, 60-63).

Anat, the sister and consort of Baal, grieves as well, and she descends to the underworld, going by way of the edge of the desert at the Western horizon and accompanied by Shapshu, the sun-goddess. Anat seizes and slays Mot, thereby freeing Baal and restoring him to the world of the living. The restoration of Baal requires the cessation of mourning and the return to social life, as announced by El: In a dream of El the Kind, the compassionate, in a vision of the Creator of all, the heavens rained down oil ' the wadis fan with honey El the kind, the compassionate was glad: he put his feet on a stool, he opened his mouth and laughed; he raised his voice and shouted; "I now take my seat and rest, my soul rests within me, because Baal the conqueror lives, the Prince, the lord of the earth is alive!" (Anderson 1991, 67)

Mourning is also explored in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, King of Uruk and two-thirds divine, suffers the death of his friend Enkidu, who had learned of his impending death through a precognitive dream (Tab. 7; Co!. 4):

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He seized me and led me down to the house of darkness... The house where one who goes in never comes out again, The road that, if one takes it, one never comes back, The house that, if one lives there, one  never sees light, The place where they live on dust, their food is mud (Gardner and Maier, 1984, 178).

When Enkidu dies after his dream, Gilgamesh is devastated and realizes that he too will die one day (Tab. 9; Col):

Gilgamesh for his friend Enkidu bitterly cried. He roamed the hills. "Me! Will I too not die like Enkidu? Sorrow has come into my belly. I fear death; I roam over the hills. I will seize the road" (Gardner and Maier 1984, 196)

This passage portrays Gilgamesh crossing the Steppe, which is the same as descending into the underworld (Bottera 1980, 32). The crossing implies a state of shock and panic; for Gilgamesh cries, pulls out his hair, takes off his clothing, puts on lions' skins, and refuses to eat food. Such actions mean that Gilgamesh has regressed to a primal state of nature, which Enkidu originally represented (Tigay 1982, 202­203). Enkidu had walked the Steppe with wild animals, was hairy, ate grass, and did not like human food. His friendship with Gilgamesh had been a part of his humanization. Clinically, the grieving of Gilgamesh reveals a mania and contact-seeking for the lost "object" and for immortality, as a conquest of death.

However, Gilgamesh encounters Siduri, the bar-maid, and he explains to her (Tab. 10; Co!. 2):

Enkidu whom I love dearly underwent with me all hardships. The fate of mankind overtook him. Six days and seven nights I wept over him until a worm fell out of his nose. Then I was afraid. In fear of death I roam the wilderness (Gardner and Maier 1984, 212).

This passage confirms a ritually prescribed period of seven days of mourning and indicates that Gilgamesh grieves beyond that limit. He who has delayed burial, kept searching for the deceased, and wandered the Steppe has identified with the dead and exhibited acute chronic grief.

/Pages  168 to 172 seem to be lost (I will try to refind them. Ed)

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procession, thus contradicting the idea of death as "the land of no return." The apparent cause of such manifestations was the absence of burial (Bottero 1980, 40-41). The rituals focused on the skull; that is, the sun deity would speak through a skull of the deceased, who in turn, would return through it. Some rituals were used to prevent the apparitions of the dead from occurring. One text describes the skull being kissed or licked to prevent the grinding of teeth during sleep (Finkel 1983-1984, 14). This suggests that the dead returned to the living through epileptic seizures.

Although necromancy took place in Israel, (I Sam. 28) it was forbidden in the normative Mosaic tradition (Deul. 18: 11). Whereas in the archaic period of Israel, the dead were thought to occupy Sheol totally alienated from God, the prophets proclaimed that God himself descended into Sheol (I Sam. 2:6; Amos 9:2a). Therefore, necromancy came into conflict with the power of God.

The prophets introduced into Israel a new vision of God as the Divine Warrior, who occupies a throne in the heavenly courtroom, surrounded by members of the divine council (I Kgs. 22: 19-23). The prophets proclaimed God as supreme over the elements and over the gods of the ancient Near Eastern mythologies. The power of the Divine Warrior was displayed in the unique biblical form of the cross-over pattern,  beginning with the Creation Narrative, in which "a wind from God swept over the face of the waters" (Gen. 1:2b). Thus, the primal act of Creation involved a crossing over the elements of chaos, an act which simultaneously was a release of power over the realm of the dead.

The primeval cross-over of Creation was reenacted in the Exodus, when God commanded Moses and Aaron to perform a blood sacrifice, after which he "will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt " (Ex. 12: 12a) This night of terror allows the Hebrews to escape from bondage in Egypt and cross over the Red Sea by means of the ebb and flow of the water:
The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and turned the sea into dry land; and the waters were divided. The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. The Egyptians pursued, and went into the sea after them.. ..(Ex. 14:21b, 22, 23a)

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The Egyptian army became stuck in the mud; ie. they descended into the miry bog of Sheol. Then Moses stretched out his hand, and the waters returned, drowning the Egyptians (Ex. 14:27-28). The waters that submerged the Egyptians were the same waters over which the Spirit of God crossed at Creation. The triumph of the Divine Warrior in the Exodus anticipated the Revelation of the Law on Mt. Sinai and, after settling in Canaan, the establishment of the Temple. Solomon constructed the First Temple as a "bridge" between the divine and earth, since it was built according to the heavenly model (Ex. 25-9, 40; 26:30; 27:8). The Psalmist exc1aims: "The Lord is in his holy Temple; the Lord's throne is in heaven. His eyes behold, his gaze examines humankind" (11:4).

The Temple liturgy celebrated the enthronement of the Divine Warrior, and it included sacrifices and acts of praise as recalled in the Psalter. Rejoicing in the temple was a public act of avowal, comparable to the royal custom of inscribing words on public monuments (Kugel , 126-127).

By rejoicing one created a verbal monument, establishing a participation in the presence of God and standing in opposition to the inscriptions on the walls of tombs. The Temple liturgy also conquered death, and this conquest was signified by the holy water in the courtyard, waters representing the primal sea of chaos, the abyss of Creation (I Kgs. 7:23-26; Ps. 74:12-17).

The prophet Isaiah integrated the presence of the Divine Warrior and the Temple with his vision of the Holy.

. ..I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the Temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him.. .And one called to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips".. ..(Isa. 6: 1b-2a, 3-4)

The prophet's stammering reflects that of Moses before the "Burning Bush" (Ex. 4: 10) as a form of stuttering, which is a psychic equivalent of epilepsy (Szondi 1973, 106). Only an angel can cleanse Isaiah's stuttering and allow him to stand in the presence of the holy.

Isaiah formulated an admission liturgy, which featured the divine fire:
Who among us can live with the devouring fire? Who among us

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can live with everlasting flames?" (Isa. 33: 14b). Since the age of the patriarchs, fire had been the divine element in covenant-making (Gen. 15:17-18a; Ex. 3:2; 19:18). Fire emanated from the Spirit of Creation and became an agent of divine revelation: "you make the winds your messengers, fire and flame your ministers" (Ps. 104:4).

Isaiah also formulated a historical eschatology, using Canaanite mythic images and cross-over motifs. He envisaged God's ultimate conquest of death and the cessation of mourning: "he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces(Isa. 25:7b-8a) The end of mourning coincides with the resurrection of the dead: "Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust awake and sing for joy!" (Isa. 26: 19a)

The Divine Warrior will defeat the demonic forces of death. "On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea" (Isa. 27: 1). This passage restates the Canaanite myth of Baal, who slays the "Crooked Serpent, the seven ­headed beast of the sea" (Gray 1961, 132). In the oracle of Isaiah the serpentine monster is a transpersonal force of death and chaos. It anticipates an impending catastrophe in the history of Israel, namely, the Babylonian Exile (586-538 B.C.E.), when political subjugation by a foreign power prevented the realization of historical eschatology. When the words of the prophets could not be carried out historically, then the vision of the Divine Warrior shifted to a transcendent visionary plane, and apocalyptic eschatology came into being.

IV. DREAMS AND VISIONS OF THE NIGHT

In the Old Testament epochal cross-over events take place at night (e.g. Passover); and the same theme occurs in the New Testament (e.g. the birth of Jesus). Since the night reflects Sheol, cross-over events are full of danger and intrigue. In the history of religions the night is an archetype with three symbolic forms: (1) a time of terror, oppressive silence, or death; (2) a time of oblivion, as in sleep or death; and (3) a time of revelation (Bleeker 1963, 74-76). As a time of revelation, the night is sacred.

Night is primordial; for in the Creation Narrative it comes from the darkness of the abyss (Gen. 1 :5). Biblical revelation occurs at night through dreams and visions (I Sam. 3). Between the Revelation of the

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Law on Mt. Sinai and the settlement in Canaan, God says he speaks directly to Moses but indirectly to the prophets through dreams and visions (Num. 12:6-8). The same linking of dream and vision is confirmed by the prophet Joel (2:28), who declares: "Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions." The purpose of dreams and visions is explained by Job:

For God speaks in one way, and in two, though people do not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on mortals, while they slumber on their beds, then he opens their ears, and terrifies them with warnings, that he may turn them aside from their deeds, and keep them from pride, to spare their souls from the Pit, their lives from traversing the River (33:14-18).

A vision is an experience of an event that is not present and that reveals an immediate  understanding, regardless of distance and sense perception (Pedersen 1926,

141). This definition presupposes that life is a whole and that all events are interrelated. Dreams are like visions in the sense that they disclose potentialities for coming occurrences. There is no distinction between dream and action; for dreamwork is expressed in the perfect tense as completed action. The specific dream content may be that of a promise, prediction, or mandate. For example, Jacob is promised offspring in the context of a ladder that "bridges" heaven and earth (Gen. 28:10-16). Dreams of Joseph (Gen. 37:5-11) and Pharaoh (Gen. 41: 1-45) predict events symbolically and need to be interpreted. Solomon's dream at Gibeon mandates for him "a wise and discerning mind, riches and honor," if he keeps the statutes and commandments (I Kgs. 3:4-15).

The Bible grants priority to visions and treats dreams critically. The Mosaic tradition governs the interpretation of dreams. If one were to practice divination through dreams, thereby deriving knowledge from other gods, then one would be put to  death for treason (Deut. 13:1-5). The standard of dreams is divine truth (Jer. 23:23-28). As preparation for revelation through dreams and visions, a period of deprivation like mourning was recommended. When waiting for the Sinai Revelation in the desert, the Hebrews cleansed themselves for three days (Ex. 19: 10, 15), and Moses fasted forty days and forty nights, even lying  prostrate (Deut. 9:9, 18). When Moses ascended the mountain to

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receive the Revelation, his face was lowered; after receiving it, he descended and his face shone (Ex. 34:28-35). Moses' radiance confirms the Revelation as a gift of joy, an act in which God had no reservations (Muffs 1975, 26-27). The joy is a revelation of God's everlasting willingness.

During the Babylonian Exile, Ezekiel had a great vision of the divine glory and the throne chariot (1: 1-27). He sat among the exiles by the river, as though bereaved, "for seven days. At the end of seven days, the Word of the Lord came to me" (Ez. 3:15-16). In the post-exilic period, Daniel underwent ritual mourning in preparation for a night vision. He sustained "prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes" (Dan. 9:3). At the time of his vision, he says: "I had eaten no rich food, no meat or wine had entered my mouth, and I had not anointed myself at all, for the full three weeks" (Dan. 10:3).

Daniel gains from his ritual mourning "insight into all visions and dreams" (Dan. 1: 17b). Nebuchadnezar has a dream, and only Daniel can interpret it through a vision of the night (2:19). The God of Daniel's ancestors "reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with him" (2:22). The setting of Daniel's night vision is clarified as follows:
I, Daniel, alone saw the vision; the people who were with me did not see the vision, though a great trembling fell on them, and they fled and hid themselves (10:7). So while he was speaking this word to me, I stood up trembling. He said to me, "Do not fear, Daniel " (lO:11b).

"My Lord, because of the vision such pains have come upon me that I retain no strength. How can my Lord's servant talk with my Lord? For I am shaking, no strength remains in me,  and no breath is left in me" (10: 16b-17).

These passages indicate that Daniel suffers fear, trembling, and ecstasy, which represent the paroxysmal-epileptiform context of apocalyptic eschatology. Altogether, the visions

ombine into a night terror, by inhibiting Daniel's breathing and rendering him powerless. The night terror indicates a psychic distance between the visionary and a transcendent realm. The night terror signifies profound anxiety. The psychic distance is maintained in a final vision, which employs the cross-over images of the river and the distant shore:

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Then I, Daniel looked, and two others appeared, One standing on this bank of the stream and One on the other. One of them said to the man clothed in linen, who was upstream, "How long shall it be until the end of these wonders?" The man clothed in linen, who was upstream, raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven. And I heard him swear by the One who lives forever that it would be for a time, two times and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end, all these things would be accomplished (12:5-8).

Immanent consciousness is expressed by the banks of the river downstream and transcendent consciousness, as the bearer of revelation, by the river upstream. The vision promises that when the political and religious persecution of the people ends, visions will cease. The time of the end remains a secret; for it is decreed only by the Divine Warrior in heaven. The task is to endure persecution through wisdom and piety, so as to join the heavenly council arter death and be radiant forever (Dan. 12:2-3).

V. JESUS' "CROSS-OVER" MINISTRY

The Gospel of Mark continues the apocalyptic eschatology of Daniel, beginning with the proclamation of John the Baptist, who cries out (boao) in the desert: "Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight" (1 :3). The proclamation is followed by John's baptism of Jesus, an event rich in shock symbolism: "And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'" (1:10-11) The passage contains a paroxysmal parallelism of ascent (anabainon) and descent (katabainon). Through the sacred power of water, the fiery spirit establishes a participatory bond with Jesus, making him a "bridge," as it were (Bleeker 1963, 85). The baptism is sanctified by three eschatological signs: (1) opening of the heavens; (2) descent of the Spirit; and (3) the heavenly voice.

Further, cross-over motifs appear in the healing ministry of Jesus; when he crosses " the sea to the other shore, he performs a miracle (Mk. 5:21-34). The next two passages portray Jesus crossing over the waters

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and reenacting the same motif, as in Creation and Exodus when the evening had come, he said: "Let us go across to the other side." And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great storm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" (Mk. 4:35-39).

This passage reenacts Psalm 107:29: "he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed;" a Psalm which affirms praise and thanksgiving for deliverance from Sheol. The Greek term for rebuke (epitimao) is strong, and it means an aggressive discharge of energy against the demonic forces of death. As with Old Testament visions, this episode takes place at night, the time of apocalyptic revelation.

When evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea. He intended to pass them by. But when they saw him walking on he sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid" (Mk. 6:47-50). The episode designates an apocalyptic situation, as revealed by the Markan code word "immediately" (euthus), used throughout the Gospel to stress  the urgency of the end-time. The passage declares that this Jesus, who now walks on the water, is the same as the divine Spirit that swept over the dark waters at the Creation. The terror of the disciples is a natural response to the anxiety of the primal abyss.

Terror continues to build, when Jesus predicts his future suffering and death: "The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priest, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again" (8:31). An objective sense of danger accumulates, because Jesus' ministry collides with traditional temple

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religion. That Jesus intends to reform temple religion is indicated in the transfiguration, which is an apparition that correlates with the pervasive danger: Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up on a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his c1othes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a c1oud overshadowed them, and from a cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them anymore, but only Jesus (Mk. 9:2-8).

The transfiguration consists of an apparition, since the verbs for "appeared" (ophthe) in verse four and "saw" (eidon) in verse eight are variants of the same term (horao). They denote non-sensory vision, as will be argued below in section seven. In the passage of Jesus walking on the water, cited above, the verbs for "saw" also derive from the verb (horao) for non-sensory vision.

Jesus is beheld, on the one hand, in relation to Moses, the prophet who had been commissioned as a "bridge" between God and the people (Deut. 18:15-18). On the other hand,

Jesus is viewed in relation to Elijah, the keeper of the sacred tradition who appears in times of messianic change. Elijah had not actually died, according to tradition: "As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven"

(I Kgs. 2: 11). Motifs of ascent and whirlwind are paroxysmal images of a shock event, that of Elijah's passing into heaven.

The mountain, on which the transfiguration occurs, is the exclusive place for revelation in the Bible. Allusions to the three dwellings (skenas) in verse five denote the "Tent of Meeting," where God dwelled (skn) with his people, during the desert sojourn between the Revelation on Sinai and the settlement (Ex. 25:8; 29:45; 36-40:35). Reenacting the image of the desert dwelling, prior to the building of the temple, is intended to renew temple worship in terms of the prophetic tradition.

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The voice, approving Jesus as the "beloved son" is the same eschatological sign of the baptism, and it means that Jesus hears the prophetic tradition in the impending "Day of the Lord".

Finally, the Transfiguration stands at the center of the Gospel narrative, and in the second half the setting shifts from the mountain to the city of Jerusalem. After entering the city, Jesus goes directly to the temple, where he preaches an apocalyptic sermon (Mk. 13). Since his predictions of suffering and death lead to a confrontation with the temple authorities, his purpose for going to Jerusalem is to die and, thereby, bring about a reversal of the established order. The temple complex, inc1uding city and mountain, had been built as a "bridge" between heaven and earth (Ps. 48); but Jesus' death will overturn the sacred order of Creation.

VI. EMPTYING OF TEMPLE AND TOMB

The Gospel narrative culminates in the cruciflxion of Jesus. To cope with the shame and horror of Jesus' death, Christians used selected Old Testament texts, such as (1) apocalyptic eschatology (e.g. Joel 2-3; Zech. 9-14; Dan. 7); (2) prophecies concerning Israel and her future (e.g. Isa. 6:1-9, 7); (3) Psalms of the suffering righteous and the servant songs (e.g. Ps. 22, 38,

 69; Isa. 42-53); and (4) other miscellaneous passages (Weber 1979, 31).

As reported in Mark, Psalm 22 was the principal text for dealing with Jesus' death. While hanging on the cross, Jesus cries out the first verse of Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk. 15:34b). Jesus is surely affirming the entire Psalm, since, in Jewish liturgical practice, reciting the first verse represents the entire passage. In Hebrew logic the part embodies the whole. Although the first verse of Psalm 22 laments abandonment, the rest of the Psalm declares praise. Jesus' cry of abandonment complements the cry of John the Baptist, stated at the beginning of the Gospel: "The voice of One crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight'" (Mk. 1 :3). In each passage the verb for crying out is the same (boao), a fact suggesting that abandonment prepares the way of the Lord.

To understand what Jesus thought in the face of death it is necessary to consult the remainder of Psalm 22. The Psalmist goes from the cry of abandonment to the faith of the ancestors; "Yet you are holy,

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enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame" (vs. 3-5). The Psalmist admits he is a worm not human, scorned, despised, and mocked by "all who see me" (vs. 6-7). Nevertheless, God has been present, since his birth (vs. 9-11). He is dried up, in the dust, near death. Bulls encircle him like lions; dogs are around him (vs. 12, 16). Evil-doers divide his clothing and cast lots for it (v. 18).

 from "you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him" (v. 25). With avowal and rejoicing the Psalmist exults in the dominion of God over all the earth. Even the dead and all future generations will obey the Lord (vs. 28-31). Then the Psalm concludes with a claim of deliverance for the descendants who are yet to come.

Several decisive themes in Psalm 22 are quoted by other Gospels, which were written after Mark: abandonment (Matt. 27:46), being seen by all (Lk. 23:35), mocking (Matt. 27:39), dried up (Jn. 19:28), division of garments (Matt. 27:35; Lk. 23:34; Jn. 19:24), and trust in God (Matt. 27:43). References to the animals reflect symbolic functions known in the history of religions. The bull is a sacrificial animal, and the dog is the guardian of the dead. In the Psalm these are trace-images, suggesting the degradation of Jesus' death. In ancient Israel the Psalms of praise represented public acts of avowal in the temple. Jesus' implied affirmation of praise was performed publically, not in the temple, but in the context of a shameful death. The overall effect of Jesus' avowal was to shatter the traditionally sharp dichotomy of tomb and temple, mourning and rejoicing. When Jesus died, "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom" (Mk. 15:38). The ritual dichotomy eroded, further, because the crucifixion occurred during the season of Pass over and the festival of UnIeavened Bread (Mk. 14: 1), two festivals appointed as times of celebration and sacrifice (Num. 28:16-25; Lev. 23:5-14).

Mark portrays the essence of the crucifixion as the mystery of darkness. "When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon" (15:33). At three o'c1ock, Jesus cries out in abandonment, only after enduring three hours of darkness in silence. The darkness makes the death a cosmic event; for the darkness is that of the cosmic sea, the abyss of Creation (Grayston 1952). The darkness at noon recapitulates the horror and violence of Sheol (Ps. 88), the waters

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of which flow from the subterranean ocean of the primeval chaos (Ps. 7: 12-20). During the silence of the darkness, all things return to the primal state under the power of God. When Jesus affirms Psalm 22, light returns, indicating a "re-creation" of the world. Just as darkness covered the Passover in Egypt, so is the darkness of the crucifixion a new Exodus. Through the mystery of darkness, the apocalyptic death of Jesus overturned the sacred order of Creation as represented by temple religion.

Matthew elaborated the apocalyptic nature of Jesus' death even further: "The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised" (27:52). Luke emphasizes the falling of the mountains, the darkness covering the land, and the failing of the sun's light (23:30, 44­45). Luke's image of the falling mountain comes from the prophet Hosea (10:9) and that of darkness from Amos (8_9). Altogether images of earthquake and darkness indicate that the revelation occurs in the eruptive forces of Sheol in death and grief, rather than in the temple.

John interprets Jesus' death as fulfillment of Zechariah's apocaIyptic vision. In John the bystanders "look on the One whom they have pierced" (19:37), which is a quotation of Zechariah 12:10: "...when they look on the One whom they have pierced, they shaIl  mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as One weeps over a firstborn." The historical setting for Zechariah was the rebuilding of the Temple after the Babylonian Exile, spanning a seventy year period of fasting and mourning

(Zech. 8: 19). By anaIogy, the grief for Jesus is the same as that of the exiles, who mourned until the Second Temple was rebuilt.

Matthew states that the Second Temple, built after the Exile, had become corrupted, as indicated by Judas' betrayal of Jesus for "thirty shekels of silver" (26: 15). The same phrase appears in Zechariah (11: 13) and signifies the corruption of the Temple treasury. The corruption of the Temple justifies the judgment in the crucifixion; since the Temple has become corrupt, it can no longer represent Creation.

The judgment of the Temple is correlated with the empty tomb episode in the Resurrection Narrative. In Mark the women go to the tomb in the morning to anoint the corpse of Jesus. Following the Old Testament custom, anointing with oil may be interpreted as an act of joy (Anderson 1991,46). Isaiah stipulates the anointing of oil for those who have emerged from death and grief (61:3) and who obtain joy amid

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sorrow (35:10). By going to the tomb to anoint the body, the women intended to come to terms  with their grief.

When the women arrive at the tomb, however, they discover the stone has been rolled away, and it is empty. An angel announces that Jesus has been raised from the dead and would meet them in Galilee. The women react by fleeing from the tomb in fear (Phobos), trembling (tromos), and ecstasy (ekstasis). Mark restates the Greek text of Daniel (10), where the same terms are found in the context of an apocalyptic night vision (Kee, et. al. 1973, 141). In both Daniel and Mark the fear, trembling, and ecstasy follow a period of mourning and anticipate catastrophic end of the world order. In Mark the episode of the empty tomb complements the eschatological signs of the baptism.

The opening of the tomb parallels that of the heavens and the ascent of Jesus corresponds to his "being raised" (egerthe) as expressed in an aorist passive verb with aggressive, punctiliar action. The heavenly voice of the baptism is that of the angel in the tomb. Unlike Daniel in Mark the ecstasy of the women is a vision of a new day and not the night.

VII. CRUCIFIXION AFTERIMAGE

Matthew, Luke, and John present what are commonly calIed resurrection appearances. After his death Jesus appears to his disciples in Galilee in Matthew (28: 16-20), in Jerusalem in Luke (24:36-49), and the sea of Tiberius in John (21:1-24). The intent of these appearances is to make restitution for Jesus' death (Perrin 1977, 33). In light of the narrative context I contend that the appearances are actually apparitions and that they derive from the afterimage of Jesus' death. Frederic Myers has explained that apparitional activity blinds up one week before an expected death and then from a peak gradually levels off to one year, when it ends. The New Testament describes a similar pattern but reverses the timing. The build up of apparitional activity begins with the transfiguration, as linked with Jesus' prediction of his own death and culminates in the crucifixion, probably within a one-year limit. The shock of the crucifixion releases radiant energy within a span of time that is no longer than one week. Radiance signifies the renewaI of Creation and shines forever. My argument is based upon the fact that the principal verb in the Resurrection Narrative is horad, which means beholding through the

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mind, comprehending, or recognizing. This verb correlates with the noun hararna, which means a striking vision, whether sleeping or awake. The verb may be contrasted with blepo, which means seeing through the eye, watching, or noticing things. In Matthew, the figure in the grave is an angel, who announces that the Risen Jesus will meet the women in Galilee. The context turns quickly from fear, as was the case in Mark, to great joy. The women run to tell the disciples, and together they confront Jesus in his apparitional being; and he says to them: "Greetings" (Matt. 28:9), They "seize" his feet and worship him. Following Hebrew thought, where in the part represents the whole, feet mean the entire personality. Since the seizure lacks force, the verb (krateo) should be translated as apprehending, holding fast, or relating to. The apprehension of Jesus occurs apparitionally in great joy, since intense grief for his death has ended. Whereas the grief is not resolved in Mark, in Matthew it is.

Luke innovates by separating the Resurrection from the Ascension and placing the apparitions in a forty day interval between the two events. The Road to Emmaus story combines the desert tradition of hospitality (Gen. 18:1-8) with the apparitions. Two men are walking along the road and joined by a stranger, who is actually Jesus. They talk with sadness about the death of Jesus, and when they arrive at Emmaus, they break bread with the stranger, whose identity as Jesus is immediately revealed. Welcoming the stranger is a revelation of Jesus' presence and an incorporation of the deceased into the community. Welcoming the stranger coincides with the resolution of grief.

Jesus suddenly vanishes; he goes to Jerusalem and greets the disciples, who are terrified and think he is a ghost. Jesus says: "Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have" (Lk. 24:39). They respond with joy, and he eats a piece of broiled fish with them. This episode is apparitional, but secondary corporeal traits inhere with the vision. The command to see (v. 39) employs horad, which, therefore, requires that the verb for touch (pselopho) be translated as "attachment" or "feeling." The second verb to see, at the end of the verse, is theoreo, which means "being a mental spectator," with or without open eyes.

Luke's narrative emphasizes the early Christian tradition of divine necessity. Jesus died in accordance with the scripture; his suffering and death were necessary to fulfill the Law, prophets, and the Psalms (24:44­ .

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46), Thus, the purpose of the apparitional phase is to reveal the divine necessity. Luke describes the Ascension as follows:

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the Temple blessing God (Lk. 24:50­53).

The Ascension is an exaltation of Jesus to a state of glory or radiant being, which coincides with the release of joy and the cessation of mourning. The motif of ascent echoes that of the heavenly journey, which is the Hellenistic counterpart to the older Hebrew notion of descent into Sheol. Manifesting joy and blessing in the temple indicate that the reform of Temple religion has been accomplished.

Finally, John also deals with the resurrection apparitions in the context of Jesus' ascent to God the Father. Jesus appears first to a bereaved Mary Magdalene, saying:

 "Do not hold on (haptou) to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father" (Jn. 20: 17) Then he appears to his disciples at night and declares: "'Peace be with you.' After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side, then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord" (Jn. 20: 19b-20). This episode is followed by Jesus' conferring the Holy Spirit and apparitional signs to Thomas, the seven disciples, and to Peter.

The Johannine apparitions should be viewed in terms of the earlier farewell discourse, particularly chapter 16. Jesus acknowledges their sorrow on his departure from the world and explains that "you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy" (Jn. 16:20). The anguish of grief is compared to the labor pains of birth, so that when a child is born joy replaces suffering. Hence, Jesus counsels that "you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you" (16:22).

Jesus encourages detachment from him and from the world on the grounds that sorrow turns into joy. Therefore, Jesus' command to Mary Magdalene must be interpreted as: "Do not cling to me," which is one