Hindu Medicine c7.291

c7.291

The paragraph on auspicious dreams sounds as if it were copied from a dreambook. Here, as with pre-analytical dream interpretation in general, the fact is ignored that the same symbols can have very different meanings according to the context in which they figure. Meeting dead people by no means invariably foretells the death of the dreamer, even when he is ill; symbols of passing away frequently point to spiritual transformation and rebirth into a new attitude towards the task of life. Yet the lurid description of this kind of encounter with the dead reminds one of a certain sinister dream of Oscar Wilde’s, which soon after was to be actually fulfilled. In the last month of his life, confined to the bed on which he was to die, Wilde, suffering from cerebral meningitis complicated by another terrible disease, had a depressing dream wherein he was supping with the dead,—an appropriate symbol foreboding the approaching end of the “king of life,” the master of dining and wining, the brilliant raconteur of the dinner-table.