Are ghosts the dreams of the dead?

[Ninshub]

The unnamed (?) author of this blog/site has an interesting article regarding a once held but now discarded and forgotten theory about ghosts. Even if survival of consciousness turns out to be a fact, what if ghosts aren't apparitions of the deceased but instead their dreams?

Dead and Dreaming: Persistence of the Unconscious After Death

This lead me to explore a theory of ghosts that had it’s heyday in the late 1800’s, but isn’t talked about much anymore – that is, that ghosts (as well as a number of other paranormal phenomena), may just be “the dreams of the dead”.  Hold on cowpoke, you’re probably saying, that makes no sense whatsoever.  Bear with me.  While there are exceptions, most theories regarding ghosts are variations on the persistence of consciousness after death.  Personally, my consciousness barely persists while I’m alive, but what is life except convincing people otherwise.  Assuming the persistence of consciousness in some form after the mortal flesh has checked out, is pretty essential for most religions, and is equally important if you want to ascribe some sort of agency to our spectral friends.  And we need to assign agency to ghosts if we expect to talk to them, explain why they’re moving things about, interact, or chase them to the ends of the earth.

There is, as always, a logical fallacy here.  Why assume, if consciousness persists after death, that the manifestation of ghosts in the cheap seats of reality where we live, are actually representations of that consciousness.  Would it not be equally valid to assume that if consciousness persist, so to do dreams, or the unconscious.  Six thousand years of interactions with ghosts, which we’ve been recording ever since it turned out all you needed was a stick and clay and could thus grab a little piece of immortality, and the vast majority of such encounters have a dreamlike quality.  Striking terror in the hearts of mortal men might seem entertaining for a while, but should consciousness persist beyond death, there have got to more interesting things to do.  So, if we predicate our notion of ghosts with the idea that consciousness persists beyond death, why not assume that the unconscious similarly abides?  Makes you wonder if there are ghost psychiatrists.  “Doc, I’m having trouble with this whole death thing…”.  Poet Frederick William Henry Myers (1843-1901), and a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, seems to have been the guy who really fleshed out this theory (...)