Dementors - Hermione

[dfrankis at dial.pipex.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 18959

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Tim Kronsell <timkronsell2 at o...> wrote:
> The Patronus appears to me to work against the dementors, like D's 
> work against humans.
> 
> Dementors are filling a ´human with felelings of sorrow, hatred, 
hopelessness, 
> etc. and a Patronus is filling the dementor
> with feelings of happiness, joy, hope, etc.
> 
> Thus rendering it dead if keeping it up to long. Therefor the 
dementor flees, 
> rather than stay and be killed.
> 
> Darreder
>
Reading these posts has set me thinking... 

JKR has gone on record that dementors are the product of a period of 
depression she went through - I believe that is why they are so 
scary, as they are the expression of a real experience (I wonder 
about the lethifold too).

With that in mind, I think this is how the patronus may work.  It is 
plain that the d's suck out good, rather than fill up with bad. They 
affect some worse than others because they have more bad 
(experiences) to leave behind.  The basic strategy is to resist by 
holding on to the good things, in particularly the memory of a moment 
of supreme happiness.  The patronus is the embodiment and symbol of 
this.  Its unique shape asserts that it belongs to the sender alone 
and therefore cannot be assimilated by the dementors.  The message 
the dementors receive from its existence and activity is that 
(because the sender has achieved the inner victory of holding on to 
the memory) there is a source of hope that swamps their ability to 
suck it away.  Once the dementors are dispersed the patronus returns 
to its sender from whom it was never really separate.

In Harry's case, this is bound up with (the assurance of) 
reconnecting to his father through Sirius.

We may speculate that JKR did something similar to win her own inner 
victory - if so, we may all have benefited as the series might have 
stopped after 2.5 books.

Any thoughts?

David