SOUL POSSESSION

In the new British series, Intruders, the premise is that after people die, their souls can live on . . . by possessing a live individual. It is an interesting concept of demonic possession from ancient times (which in many instances was misdiagnosis of actual medical conditions like seizure disorders).

LOST did feature elements of multiple souls. In ancient Egyptian death rituals, the person's soul is divided at death into the ka and ba which separately have to journey through the underworld to try to be reunited in the after life. If souls were released upon death, sci-fi allows for these intelligent vessels to inhabit other human beings.

In a bait-and-switch type theory, the 815 survivors could have been "possessed" by lost souls, the whispers, trapped on the island. In fact, the only reason the survivors "lived" after the crash was that they were re-possessed by island souls.

For example, what if Jack was near death in the bamboo grove when dead Horace, the former leader of the Dharma group, possesses his body? There were many of the Dharma group that was purged by Ben's Others. And when the Others member died, they destroyed the body which may be so that that body could not be repossessed by an island soul.

If there were possession by island souls, that could explain why Jack immediately took to pushing back against Ben and the Others because deep inside he knew of their threat and danger because Horace's soul was influencing his decision making process. When they talked about "a war" on the island, it may be a never ending saga of souls reanimating their revenge with new visitors time after time for eternity (much like the reality of the Middle East conflicts).

The island souls could become the dominate personality in a person's body; repressing the person's actual soul until its "second death." The real soul may be in a sort of suspended animation, a dream state of confusion, during the island time line. Perhaps the suspended animation of souls is a better explanation of the sideways limbo state.