DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

510:1 Cf. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, pp. 257 ff. Blackwood’s Magazine, cxxix (January 1881), contains a remarkable account of a child who remembered previous lives. Lord Lindsay, in his Letters (ed. of 1847, p. 351), refers to a feeling when he beheld the river Kadisha descending from Lebanon, of having in a previous life seen the same scene. Dickens in his Pictures from Italy testifies to a parallel experience. E. D. Walker, in his interesting work on Reincarnation (pp. 42-5) has brought together many other well-attested cases of people who likewise have thought they could remember fragments of a former state of conscious existence. In his diary, under date of February 17, 1828, Sir Walter Scott wrote as follows : — ‘I cannot, I am sure, tell if it is worth marking down, that yesterday, at dinner-time, I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of pre-existence, viz. a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time.’ Lockhart, Life of Scott (first ed.), vii. 114. Bulwer Lytton in Godolphin (chapter xv), and Edgar Allen Poe in Eureka, record similar experiences. Mr. H. Fielding Hall, in The Soul of a People (London, 1902), pp. 290-308, reports several very remarkable cases of responsible natives of Burma who stated that they could recall former lives passed by them as men and women. Mr. Hall has carefully investigated these cases, and gives us the impression that they are worthy of scientific consideration.

511:1 Cf. Ferenczi, op. cit., p. 316, &c. Professor Freud’s theory of dreams supports entirely, but does not imply our hypothesis that some (and probably many) abnormal dreams of a rare kind, whether good or bad in tendency, may be due to the latent content of subconsciousness, out of which they undoubtedly arise, having been collected and carried over from a previous state of consciousness parallel to our present one. In respect to our present life Professor Freud holds, as a result of psycho-analysis of thousands of dream subjects, that the latent content of every dream in the adult is directly dependent upon mental processes which frequently reach back to the earliest childhood; and he gives detailed cases in illustration. In other words, there is always a latent dream-material behind the conscious dream-content, and probably a part of it was innate in the child at birth, and hence, according to our view, was pre-existent. (Cf. Ernest Jones, Freud’s Theory of Dreams, in Amer. Journ. Psych., April 1910, xxi, No. 2, pp. 305 ff.)

511:2 Cf. Du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism, ii. 25 ff., 34 ff.

512:1 The Dream of Ravan, in Dublin Univ. Mag., xliii. 468.

513:1 Myers, in Proc. S. P. R., vii. 305.

513:2 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 483.

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