Soon after my wife died last year, I had a vision of her so vivid I couldn’t help but wonder if she was in the bardo – the state between life and death, according to Buddhism. Sigmund Freud regarded such hallucinations as wishful psychoses, images that arise from the profound difficulty accepting that a loved one is gone. The vulnerability of grief makes us ripe for delusion.

But what if he had it back to front? What if it is precisely at these times, when the ego is fragile, that we experience a different state of consciousness that is closer to reality?

Sigmund Freud: what would he know about the supernatural?Credit: SIGMUND FREUD MUSEUM

For sometimes, my head works harder to deny the unlikely than to deny the rational, when the evidence seems to point more to something mysterious than........

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