Her grief at his death is his pain and he wishes to be able to help her. Chris's spirit leaves his body and wanders around Borderland, removed from life and yet not moving on. Usually his son, Ian, accompanies him, but his night he is alone. As a screenplay writer, he considers his research to be watching movies. The remainder of the book is made up of this manuscript.Ĭhris Nielsen dies in a car accident one night after going to a movie. All she wishes to do is deliver the manuscript to Robert and finally get some peace. She tells Robert that Chris dictated the manuscript and refused to give her any rest until the project was done. The two-person recognition scene holds the novel's only dramatic fire: will Chris spend Ann's 25-year unexpired life-term with her in this house? More plot and less metageography would have made a stronger book, but the inspirational values should carry this essay-novel to eager readers of the life-after-death nonfiction field.What Dreams May Come beings with the prologue where Robert Nielsen relates his experience of a psychic who comes to his door claiming to have a manuscript that she has transcribed from his dead brother, Chris Nielsen. So he gets Robert to take him through the lower regions, hells within hells, until they arrive at a reproduction of the Nielson home, now fallen into hopelessly chaotic disrepair, where Ann's soul lives in dark sludge. She is his soulmate and he must help her. The twist comes when Chris' beloved wife Ann kills herself in despair and goes to the plane of suicides. His spirit guide Robert, a family member who died years ago, takes Chris under his wing and leads him about the new world, explaining how houses are built on the thought-plane, the botanical peculiarities, why the lake waters have such strange density and energy (they're just mind-stuff), and so on.

Even while attending his own funeral he finds it hard to accept the fact of the afterlife. Chris Nielson, a writer, is severely injured in an automobile pile-up and dies at the hospital. Matheson has refrained from the Gothic impulse and tried to orchestrate his occult and spiritualist research into a halfway believable story.

A pleasant but undramatic travelogue of the afterlife, blending Kubler-Ross and Raymond Moody with Arthur Ford, Ruth Montgomery, and theosophist Bishop Leadbeater, among others.

What dreams may come novel