Victims Appearing in Dreams and Investigative Intuition

Victims Appearing in Dreams and Investigative Intuition links the unsettling image of Lucía Aguirre appearing to Amaia Salazar with a broader account of how detectives make sense of a case. The visions are presented neither as proven supernatural messages nor as meaningless disturbances: Aloisius Dupree understands them as the mind bringing forward information the investigator has not consciously recognized. The novel gives that idea weight through Amaia’s dreams and through her attention to patterns among victims, while leaving the precise nature of the apparitions unresolved.

Lucía Aguirre’s appearances

The first vision comes after Amaia’s final day at work before taking leave, with her expected date of delivery two weeks away. She has been trying to put the investigation aside and return to family life with James. In the dream, Lucía stands before her in the red-and-white sweater visible in the photograph at Amaia’s home. Lucía tries repeatedly to speak, but Amaia cannot make out the words. She wakes unsettled by the woman’s distress and disappointed that the apparition has interrupted a period in which, since conceiving her daughter, she had felt unusually free of fear and nightmares.

Lucía returns in a later dream beside the Baztán River. The setting changes the encounter from a silent, distant image into an attempted communication: Amaia encourages Lucía to speak, and this time makes out a repeated appeal to move something aside and catch someone. Amaia promises to catch him, but Lucía turns away and disappears into the river. The dream supplies no clear identification of what should be moved or whom Amaia should catch. Its force lies in the fragmentary instruction and in Amaia’s response: she treats the words as something to act on, although the vision itself does not establish their source or meaning.

The two dreams share the same victim and the same failure of ordinary communication, but they are not identical. In the first, Lucía’s lips move without an intelligible message; in the second, a few words emerge from the encounter, still incomplete and difficult to interpret. The progression gives form to the gap between sensing that a case contains something unseen and knowing exactly what the evidence means. Lucía’s repeated effort to reach Amaia matters, but the narrative does not confirm that she is literally a ghost or that the dreams constitute an external message.

Dupree’s account of the visions

An earlier conversation in New Orleans supplies Amaia with a framework for understanding such experiences. Aloisius Dupree, an FBI agent, asks whether victims under investigation appear at the foot of her bed. He treats the question seriously and resists reducing the experience to evidence of illness. In his view, the assumption that a detective’s disturbing dreams are simply unhealthy can obscure their connection to the work of investigation.

Dupree explains that homicide detectives spend sustained effort trying to understand how an offender thinks, while also looking to the victim for clues that might explain the crime. A body alone, he argues, may not reveal the motive; concentrating exclusively on the offender can leave the victim’s significance underexamined. Victimology offers another way to frame the inquiry: a victim’s selection is not necessarily random, and even a choice that appears random may itself disclose a pattern. On this account, dreaming of a victim is a projection of the investigator’s subconscious, another mental process through which information already encountered can begin to take shape.

Dupree grounds that account in his own experience. As a young agent, he was troubled by dreams in which victims came to him and worried that the episodes meant his mental health was failing. During a long surveillance, a veteran colleague noticed his reaction and advised him, in effect, not to resist the experience but to pay attention to what the figure might be saying. Dupree later understood the dreams as his mind projecting information he had not yet been able to see consciously. His explanation does not prove that Amaia’s vision has an external cause; instead, it allows her to regard it as potentially meaningful without settling the supernatural question.

Intuition tested against case evidence

The investigative method associated with the dreams also appears in Amaia’s comparison of Lucía’s murder with other cases. She tells the judge that Lucía’s case may be connected to the killing of Johana Márquez in Lekaroz a year earlier. Both investigations involve a confession, similar messages left by the offenders, and the same distinctive postmortem removal of a forearm. Amaia also reports that a man who killed his wife in Logroño left a message with the same unusual spelling. The recurring details lead her to consider whether one person has imposed a signature across crimes that initially appear to be separate domestic murders.

That hypothesis depends on distinctions as much as resemblance. The offenders’ relationships to their victims, histories of violence, and circumstances differ, and not every detail fits the same profile. In particular, Amaia notes that Jasón Medina does not have the aggressive, intensely frustrated temperament associated with the other offenders. Johana was the only one of the women living in the valley when she was killed, and Medina had no known history of violence. These discrepancies do not erase the similarities; they make the apparent pattern a question to test rather than a conclusion to accept at face value.

Amaia also finds two more women born in the valley who were killed by their partners, one in Bilbao and one in Burgos. Notices of their deaths had appeared in funeral homes in the valley, but the available information does not establish whether their cases share the distinctive feature found in the other investigations. Their discovery extends the inquiry while preserving uncertainty. This is the same discipline Dupree’s account implies: intuition may direct attention toward overlooked relationships, but comparison with what is known—and what remains unknown—must determine how far an inference can go.

Meaning and limits

The concept brings together two forms of attention that the novel keeps in productive tension. In dreams, Amaia receives a victim’s image and fragmentary words that resist immediate explanation. In casework, she assembles connections from recurring features, victim histories, and departures from an apparent profile. The visions dramatize the experience of noticing before fully understanding; the investigation gives that experience a practical counterpart, in which a hunch has to survive comparison with evidence.

The distinction between psychological projection and supernatural visitation remains open. Dupree offers a naturalistic explanation: the subconscious can bring forward information absorbed but not yet consciously interpreted. Lucía’s return, her unfinished message, and Amaia’s promise preserve the possibility of a more mysterious reading without establishing one. The recurring image therefore does not replace investigative work or guarantee a solution. It marks the limits of conscious attention, while victimology and careful comparison provide a method for testing what intuition has brought into view.