DREAMS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—" Unconscious reading," to which you refer in your editorial note on Mr. Harper's letter, is, as you observe, the explanation of some dreams ; but what explanation can be suggested for the following dream, and its attendant circum- stances ? I was staying with a friend, a clergyman, in south Carnarvonshire, in March, 1877, I think, and dreamt that I was one of a shooting party. One of the company shot a woodcock. When I awoke, I was impressed with a very vivid recollection
of my dream, and its locality, which, as it appeared to me, I had never seen before.
I had no occasion to mention the dream until he evening, when the following circumstances occurred. Returning with my friend from a long walk in the neighbourhood of Madryn Park, we chanced to fall iu with the squire's gamekeeper, carry- ing his gun on his shoulder. My friend and the keeper walked on some fifty or sixty yards in advance of me. They presently turned off the road at right angles, and disappeared from my view. "When I came to the spot where they had left the road, I saw them following a path through a dingle. Though I had never been in the neighbourhood before, I felt the scene was familiar to me. I stopped to collect my thoughts, and endeavour
to reconcile the inconsistency. In a moment it flashed upon me that this was the scene of my last night's dream. I had a strange feeling of expectation; the identity of the scene became every moment clearer and clearer ; my eyes fell on the exact spot where the woodcock of my dream had risen. I was certain the event of my dream would inevitably be re-enacted. I felt I must speak, and that there was not a moment to lose. I shouted to my friend,—" Look out ! I dreamt I shot a wood- cock here last night !" My friend turned and replied,—" Did you ?" The words were hardly out of his mouth and the gim off the keeper's shoulder, I was still intently gazing on the very foot of ground, when up gets a woodcock, the woodcock of my dream, and falls to the keeper's gun, a capital snap shot. We were all not a little astonished, the keeper, moreover, remarking that he thought all the woodcocks had left the country some
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