In What Dreams May Come, Chris also begins the story as a dead person. Also as in Divorce he does not at first realize that he is, in fact, a ghost. He is insubstantial, as are the ghosts in The Great Divorce. One religious scholar, Archana Dongre, has likened Matheson's Summerland to the astral planes of Western metaphysics, the Swarloka of Hinduism or the Bardos of Tibetan Buddhism (C9). In addition, Sydney Coale, writing for Hinduism Today, notes the examples of Hindu philosophy and theology in Dreams. For example, she notes his reference to the lower realms of the astral plane and the energy rather than materialism of the heaven worlds (Coale 24). She also notes Matheson's description of people's auras, the laws of karma and his understanding of the rules about reincarnation (Coale 24). Most notably, Coale traces to Hinduism M

Consequently, the important difference between Price's idea of the after-life and Hume's philosophy of the self is that Price's concept is based on an incorporeal personal identity while Hume philosophizes that there is no personal identity without a human body in which to have experiences. Nonetheless, Hume's philosophy could be applied to the concept of resurrection as depicted in Dreams, if only very loosely. Each rebirth is a forgetting: "all memories of the previous life and the interval in afterlife are obliterated, a fresh set of mental impressions begun" (Matheson 273). Thus, one could argue that each successive life is merely a variation of Hume's sequence of perceptions. But Dreams clearly follows more closely Price's concept of the afterlife. Divorce, on the other hand, could be said to come closer to Hume's philosophy if one is willing to accept the idea of Heaven as a physical place. This is Lewis' conception of it in Divorce. Heaven is what's real and we are, in fact, an incorporeal sequence of perceptions until we accept Heaven. Once in Heaven, however, we can perceive the external stimuli and objects that create us.

Similarly, the Bishop will not accept a Heaven in which he actually receives answers for his intellectual inquiries (Lewis 38). His pride in life was his intellectualism û his cleverness at asking questions he believed could never be answered. He cannot accept now a place where he actually receives those answers and so he goes back to Hell where he can deliver a paper on what might have happened had Christ not been crucifi