Double Vision: Some Strange Encounters

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In 1771 a young man was riding along a path toward Drusenhelm, Germany, when he was overtaken by a strange foreboding. Then something bizarre happened. Riding toward him on the same road was an identical replica of himself, except that the figure was wearing gray with a touch of gold –clothes the young man had never seen before. Then the vision suddenly disappeared. The rider shrugged off the incident.

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But eight years later it was to have strange repercussions: the young man found himself on the same road, wearing exactly the same clothes he had seen in his vision.

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The man in question was the German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Many years later Goethe was still intrigued by the apparent encounter with his own double. When it happened he had found it comforting, for he had just said a sad farewell to the woman he loved, Fredericka.

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“However it may be with matters of this kind generally,” he wrote in his autobiography, “this strange illusion in some measure calmed me at the moment of parting.”

Soul Meetings

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Accounts of people meeting their own doubles have been recorded from the earliest times, when the belief was widely held that the soul existed independently of the body and could depart from it. In the 16th and 17th centuries, witches were accused of sending their “fetches,” or doubles, to carry out wicked deeds.

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John Aubrey, the 17th century author of Brief Lives, quotes several examples of the double as a harbinger of death. One is the story of astrologer Sir Richard Napier. After arriving at an inn one night, Napier was led upstairs to his room by the innkeeper. When Napier looked at the bed, he was astounded to see a dead man lying in it. Napier expressed his indignation, but the innkeeper replied that there was no dead man in the bed. Napier looked at the bed again; the body was his own. According to Aubrey’s account, Napier died shortly afterward.

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More recent witnesses of the phenomenon have taken a cooler view, unworried by omens of death. In 1929 a clergyman described waking from a nap in his chair one night.

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I saw an apparition, luminous, vaporous, wonderfully real of myself, looking interestedly and delightedly at myself…After I and myself had looked at each other for the space of about five seconds, my ghostly self vanished.”

Possible Explanation

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In searching for an explanation, researchers of psychic phenomena have turned to medical literature. It contains many descriptions, particularly by migraine sufferers, of people who have encountered their own doubles. In instances where no physical condition or disease can be singled out, psychiatrists have suggested that an unduly narcissistic personality may be involved, or that the witness’s imagination has somehow been able to project him self-image onto the outside world.

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In Goethe’s case, the explanation may be even simpler. He had just said good-bye to Frederika. Perhaps his dramatist’s eye was at work as he set off on his journey.

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This may not be as illogical as it sounds; the author of Faust had a powerful imagination. In his account of the incident, Goethe refers to it as a dream, saying that he “saw not with the eyes of the body, but with those of the mind.”

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However, this does not explain how Goethe saw himself in the clothes he was to wear eight years later on a return visit. Beyond saying that his choice of clothing was “quite accidental,” he does not provide enough details for anyone today to evaluate what remains a double mystery.