What Dreams May Come in the book are derived from my wide range of reading." One of Matheson's influences was Harold W. Percival, an adherent of Theosophy, a belief system with a strong Eastern and Hindu influence. The story also shares the same theme of the ancient Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the gifted musician makes a challenging journey to Hell to retrieve his wife. One character quotes from the writings of 18th century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Matheson bases his descriptions of the death experience itself on studies by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody. When reading these accounts, Matheson found that
Greek mythology and she burst forth from his head—fully-grown and dressed for war. The earliest Greek thought about poetry considered the theogonies to be the prototypical poetic genre—the prototypical "mythos"—and imputed almost magical powers to it. Orpheus, the archetypal poet, also was the archetypal singer of theogonies, which he uses to calm seas and storms in Apollonius' "Argonautica", and to move the stony hearts of the underworld gods in his descent to Hades. When Hermes invents the lyre in the "Homeric Hymn to Hermes", the first thing he does is sing about the birth of the gods. Hesiod's "Theogony" is not only