[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR. "]
Srn,—The letters published recently in your columns con- cerning phantasms of the living encourage me to send you the account of a curious incident which occurred to me about a year and a half ago. There is no "phantasm " in the case, and the story is very similar to many others I have read of. But as it is the only experience of the kind I have had I naturally take more interest in it than, perhaps, it deserves.
I dreamed one night that I paid a visit to a small lodging- house and rang at the door. No one came to answer the bell, and I pushed the door open, and walked in. The place had a deserted look, and I was about to leave it when a couple of slatternly servants appeared. One of them asked me my business. Now, up to this point I had had no idea in my head of what my reason for visiting the house was. On this point I am quite clear. But I found myself replying at once, "I have come to see Mr. N—. Is he at home ? " The servant at once replied that he was not at home, that he had been absent for two or three days, and that they didn't know what had become of him, or where he had gone. With that my dream ended. The next morning I found on my breakfast- table a letter from my father, in which he said, "You will be sorry to hear that Mr. N— died suddenly a couple of days ago."
Now, there are two or three rather interesting points about this dream. (1) It was at least nine or ten years since I had had anything to do with Mr. N—, who used to teach me singing when I was a small boy. Since then I had, perhaps, seen him casually two or three times. He was never consciouelv in my thoughts; nor had I even known him at all welL It was in the highest degree unlikely that I should have dreamed about him without some special reason, and apart from the fact of his death, which was, of course, unknown to me, there was no such reason. (2) The obvious explanation is that my father, in writing the letter, communicated his knowledge of Mr. N—'s death to me telepathically. Indeed, this is the only " scientific " explanation. But I should like to point out the difficulties which attend it, and which seem to me to attend many similar attempts at explanation. Both my father and I are perfectly normal people, not given to indulging in psychic manifestations ; and it is really extraordinary that the telepathic rapport between us, which has certainly never been observed by either of us before, should suddenly have flashed into definite existence for such a slight reason. I mean to say that Mr. N—'s death, though, of course, we were both grieved to hear of it, could not have affected either of us at all deeply, and it was in fact a mere accident that my father even told me about it at alL It was certainly not in his mind to such an extent as to make " telepathic " communi- cation of it to me probable or even explicable. If a mere casual piece of news can be communicated "telepathically" in this way by one normally constituted person to another, then why is it that the faculty is not more frequently, even continuously, exercised P And, indeed, how is it that on really important occasions, when such a faculty ought if ever to be at work, it nearly always fails to assert itself P (3) The " symbolic character " of the dream is somewhat remarkable. According to the servant, Mr. N— had been unaccountably absent for two or three days; my father's letter told me that Mr. N— had died two or three days ago. The chrono- logy is a little vague, but it does correspond. The bald fact of death is presented in the dream under the image of a mysterious absence from home. Assuming that the tele- pathic hypothesis is the correct one, you must combine it with an hypothesis that my sub-conscious mind, after receiving the telepathic impression, set to work and furbished it up so as to present it in a suitable form to my consciousness during sleep. I do not deny this to be possible ; but it seems to require some psychological explanation, which I am unable to offer.
There are one or two other noticeable points. Did my father send me the message as he wrote the letter in the even- ing ? If so, did it lie dormant in my Bab-consciousness until I fell asleep that night P That it was not a pure coincidence I am quite convinced. Apart from the curiously suggestive form of the dream, no one could have been further from my thoughts than Mr. N—. Apologizing for the length of
Previous page
