er that he, as a visitor, is Chris-her-late-husband and not a friend of his. He makes repeated allusions to their life together and to their children, explaining that "his" children have the same names as hers and Chris's. But
It seemed unbelievable to me that she could not see the connection. It was so incredibly obvious. Yet she didn't. Never had the meaning of the phrase been so vivid to me: None so blind as those who will not see (Matheson 223).
Ann's despair is inconsolable, and her suicide, born of love of Chris, ironically cuts her off from his afterlife: There are rules, Albert explains. To work through the impurity of her life/death choices, she is obliged to be reincarnated as an untouchable in India; he chooses to be reincarnated as the humanitarian doctor who will meet and save and marry her once again, and together, as Chris hopes and believes, they will "shar[e] the transcendent glory of our love through all eternity" (Matheson 262).
The line of action in What Dreams May Come is consistent with Price's explication of immortality inasmuch as it is consistent in its insistence that the experience of the afterlife is above all noumenal, rather than phenomenal. Chris experiences his life unfolding--backwards--before his eyes, and he says that he relives it "with acute perception, experiencing and understanding simultaneously. The phenomenon was vivid, Robert, each emotion infinitely multiplied by level upon level of awareness" (Matheson 28). Chris refers to the phenomenon, but his experience of it is mental, an aspect of perception and awareness rather than of material substance.
The mental aspect of the world of the afterlife is the key to Price's description. His world is "discarnate" (2), or disembodied, conceptual, composed of mental images rather than material facts. He characterizes experience of the afterlife as a condition in which "imaging replaces sense-perception; 'replaces' it, in the sense that imagin...