AFTER DEATH

Dream of Helen Luke, age 88, recorded in her journal:

In my dream I was visiting the house of my grandmother Reinold and my Aunt Beryl. Someone pushed in a stretcher on which my grandmother lay, having just died in her old age. (She was nearly one hundred when she actually died.) The person said I would probably like to look at her. I didn't want to, but I pulled back the cloth that covered her. I had always loved her-- her simplicity and warmth-- but had never been really close to her. As soon as the cover was pulled back, she sat up and began talking. I thought what a mercy it was that had brought her to me and revealed that she wasn't dead before burial. I talked to her gently because she was speaking incoherently about the past and I felt that she had not yet realized what had happened after her experience of death. I hoped to help her come to herself as we waited for her daughter to appear. She had immediately been sent for. I thought, 'I will wait with her until her family appears and then go to my own house.'