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Volume 6: Number 3: Article 5
A Series of Possibly Paranormal Recurrent Dreams
Ian Stevenson, Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry,
University of Virginia, School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA 22908
In 1986 Dr. Walter D'Souza, an Indian physician living in the United
States, had a series of realistic dreams in which his deceased father,
who had been buried in India three years earlier, appeared to be leaving
his coffin and trying to communicate something to him. After Dr. D'Souza
had had three of these dreams, a letter from India informed his mother
that his father's bones had not been adequately disposed of. Dr. D'Souza
then believed that his dreams had some connection with the matter of
his father's bones. He urged his mother to go to India and attend to
the burial, but she and his sister minimized the difficulty, and did
not wish to spend money on a journey to India. Dr. D'Souza then had
a fourth dream similar to the previous three. He told his family about
his dreams and insisted that his mother go to India and attend to the
disposition of the bones. She agreed to go and the dreams ceased. It
seems unlikely that Dr. D'Souza before he had his dreams had any normal
awareness that anything further needed to be done for the proper disposition
of his father's bones. Paranormal interpretations of the dreams have
plausibility. Attention is drawn to the quality of vividness in dreams
as a possible marker of paranormality.
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