So many people tell me that they dream of their own death, and of their existence after death or of death narrowly escaped, that it seems as if dreams that have this tragic subject for their central figure ought to form a class apart in any attempted classification. Where the dream is one of death narrowly escaped, it seems to be something very like the bogey dream, but there is none of the sense of semi - paralysis of the limbs preventing escape from an on - coming danger, and it differs from the bogey dream by more distinct definition of the fate impending - no less a fate than death. And yet it is not in all cases a disagreeable dream. We have already noticed the case of the dreamer who was often eaten by wolves, and did not seem much to mind it; indeed it hardly seems that the notion of death was inevitably attached to the eating, although in the waking state such a fate would be more than likely to cause death, That, however, is no argument at all that it should do no in dreams. A very quaint and naive death - dream is related by one of my correspondents: "I was wandering along a lonely seaside, and came upon a young woman whom I knew at once was born on the same day and moment as myself and was my own height". Obviously such coincidences as these are an adequate form of introduction in dreams, for he goes on: "We went about together and saw castles and houses and scenery" (Query - was this still on the lonely sea - shore?) "Then she looked at me, and kissed me" (this seems to make it clear that it still must have been the lonely seaside, and even so it seems a little forward of the young woman.

So he seems to have felt, for be goes on at once, as if it was the most natural consequence) "and I died and yet, strange to say, I went about trying to find her, that I might kiss her, as she had kissed me", (The bold and unrepentant villain) "This dream was a long one " he says, " and under its influence 1 wrote a lot of doggerel, which exists somewhere among my papers, and begins -

"I was in the earlymorning when dreams they say are true Just as the sun was rising, changing the grey to blue"

Unhappily I cannot say what it was that was " in the early morning '; but the two lines are well up to the average of the dream compositions, in spite of the stories of Kubla Khan and the rest of them. A good observation that this correspondent makes is that it is interesting to notice " the strange intuitions in dreams. We see unknown people, but seem at once to know who they are and their history - see places and know all about them by intuition." An instance in point is his own young lady of the fatal kiss on the lonely shore, and for places, Miss Cobbe's finding herself in a street that she knows to be Harley Street though it has shops all down each side, whereas there is not a shop in all the dreary length of Harley Street of waking life - at least, I do not remember one.

Some dreams seem to be of the death - dream kind in its early stages, but to progress no further than the first stages, as in the case of the dreamer before quoted, who writes: "Several times I have dreamt of dying, but have always awaked before the end, and have never, in my dream, felt much pain". I think this is always and perhaps necessarily the case, that one does not feel intense pain. Any dream sensation carried to a severe pitch seems to wake one, but very intense emotion, as of pleasure, may be experienced without awaking. Possibly physiology may have some explanation of that to offer, but I do not know of any.

One correspondent writes: "If I am killed'* (in dreams, be it understood) " as has happened more than once, I contemplate my state with amused curiosity. Such dreams however, rarely come. I remember vividly one or two dreams of my childhood, notably one about hell, which always interested me to re member, partly because my hell was very prosaic" (whatever modern theology has done for this place, we seldom hear this particular complaint brought against it)" and all the people knew they would get to heaven by-and-by." Evidently there was nothing distressing in the dreamer's experiences either of death or the life after death although it was spent in the wrong place. And, curiously enough, even in the not uncommon case of dream of death by violence there is comparatively little pain accompanying the deaths. Thus one writes: "I have suffered execution, always of course condemned innocently, under, I believe, all the known forms, except burning. I have been hanged, strangled, guillotined, beheaded in the old - fashioned way, etc., and I can give as my experience that being shot, as in a military execution, is of all the least terrible and the most painless! In each case the dream continues until the suffering is over, only one wakes to common life, instead of to the life beyond" Now although this dreamer writes of "suffering "yet the chief point that this same correspondent makes against me is that the dream world is on the whole one of delight rather than of disagreeables, and I really do not see how this could be so, in his experi ence, if all these dreams of execution were accompanied by anything at all like the pain, sharp if short, that they must cause in waking life.

The name writer at the end of the letter, asks, "is not the theory that ail dreams are a recollection, however confused and distorted, of some former experience, contradicted by the execution dream"? Well, yes, seems to be the answer, such a theory would seem to be contradicted by such a dream, but we would ask, has such a theory ever been advanced seriously? Recollections of what we have received through the senses may indeed be a very large part of the stuff of dreams; but they include all that we have heard with the ears, read, or seen, in pictures or in life, with the eyes, and so on. The idea that all our dreams are far off echoes of personal experiences is surely too far fetched to be taken very gravely.

A curiously detailed death dream is related by one of those who have been good enough to write to me It is given as follows: "I was in the streets of this little town" (a certain small seaport in the far north). "and was pursued by a number of Russian sailors who were doing their best to shoot me. I ran down the pier with bullets singing about me, dived from the end and tried to swim up alongside it, under water, to the shore. Then suddenly I found myself on shore, and I shall never forget the exquisite feeling of lightness and freedom which possessed me. But all at once I caught sight of my own body lying on the beach. I knew that I was not dead, and that I might be revived if prompt measures were taken. Some men stood near, and I moved to them and tried to tell them what I wished; but found I could not make myself felt, heard or seen. Then the thought flashed through me I am a ghost and my first idea was that it would be good fun to frighten the men. Then came a sudden realisation of the fact that I was cut off from the living world, which filled me with the wildest terror and horror. I shrieked out at the men and tried to strike them, but with no effect. They, however, just then saw my body, dragged it up and began trying to revive me.

I felt myself being drawn back into the body and then I awoke." About time too, we should think, but though sensations of terror and horror are mentioned there seem to have been no actually painful sensations, even in this dream of such vivid reality and circum - stances apparently so distressing.

I like very much the account of another correspondent who writes: "I thought I had died, and was ushered into a large barn - like hall, where we were told we should find our souls. Each was to pick out his own, and to appear with it for judgment. The souls were piled at one end of the building and resembled blow - bladders. The dream vanished during the hunt for our souls." Distinctly this was a pity. Sometimes we go away with the wrong hat, sometimes better than our own, sometimes worse, from an evening party. Even that is vexatious. It would be infinitely more annoying to make a mistake in the souls and have to go through eternity badly fitted with the wrong one.

A correspondent, quoted above, says that in dreams of hell this place is found too "prosaic," of all things in the world, to be agreeable. It is almost the same feeling to which another correspondent naively confesses on finding himself not there but in heaven, its antipodes. Giving no description of it, he merely says: "I am always glad to awake from this dream, as the knowledge that I am in heaven always seems to give me a feeling of constraint". It almost seems as if this must be one of the unfortunates that had got fitted with the wrong soul, not quite equal to the exalted circumstances.

Regarding these and other forms of the death dream, it seems that they are so various that one can hardly find any common type for them. They have the common feature of absence of the severe pain which would be likely to attend the circumstances if they were real, but this is not at all distinctive of the death dreams. It is common to all dream experience, and probably it must be so, for if the pain became severe, even in the illusion, the dreamer would awake. I have grouped these few instances together under the heading of the death dream, but really they have not any features in common, there is no constancy about them, the features do not repeat themselves, as they do in the falling and the flying dreams. They ought really perhaps to be just left in the jumble of dreams in general, unclassified - suggested, so far as we can conjecture, by no one common cause; whereas, in the case of the other dreams, wherein certain features do repeat themselves constantly, there is on the contrary every reasonable ground for conjecturing that there is a common cause, if only we could find it, for each instance of their occurrence.

The death dreams seem to come under one heading by virtue only of the accident that, in each, death is either imminent, present or past; the manner of its apparent occurrence seems quite matter of chance.