Dreams of the deceased against the Catholic background of religious experiences and testimonies

Dreams of the dead make an inexhaustible sphere of analysis of the oneiric narratives for the culture research, although inseparable from the most detailed knowledge of the cultural, social, and religious surroundings, in which these dream narratives used to be and are still thriving. The author of this article, having in several aspects discussed the relationship of the oneiric narratives with the Catholic religious tradition and practices of their narrators, mainly the elderly people from the western Lithuanian region of Samogitia, proceeds to analyze the hitherto separately uninvestigated narratives characterized by oneiric motives and connected with reflections on the dead and the afterworld. These include stories of the dead appearing in dreams to the living in order to tell them of the afterworld and of their situation in it. A typical inceptive motive passed on from one narrative to another and the chief reason of the vision itself to take place comprises a prior agreement made between two people: the one who passes away first would appear to the surviving one and tell him / her about the afterworld. The majority of such narratives (particularly those recorded in the first half of the 20th century) are characterized by especially clear religious didactic nature: the whole story of the deceased is shaped as a message and testimony meant to assure the living of the actual existence of the after-life and the inevitability for everyone to be accounted for their sins and suffer sorely for them.Close connections between these narratives and the didactic exempla-type stories, which used to be particularly popular in the booklets of the religious didactic nature, published in Lithuania in the end of the 19th–the beginning of the 20th century, are also revealed. The article is supplied with the most recent examples of the narratives in consideration