Chapter IV: Dreams

Having partially discussed the subject of phantasms projected from the brain of the agent to that of the percipient, I must now briefly describe another group for which the evidence is very abundant--that of "veridical" dreams. This is a term used to describe apparitions coinciding with other events in such a manner as to suggest a connection. Your dream or hallucination is said to be veridical when it conveys an idea which is both true and previously unknown to you.

Making every allowance for the element of chance, there is a mass of evidence which mere coincidence cannot explain away. Yet we must not overlook the frequency of dreams, even of a striking character, which may once or twice in a million times actually hit on the coincident event. But besides coincidence, there is at times another normal explanation. Mr Podmore relates how a neighbour of his on the night of 24th June 1894 dreamed President Carnot had been assassinated. He told his family before the morning paper announcing the news had been opened. As has been pointed out, in a case of that kind it seems possible that the information may have reached the sleeper in his dreams from the shouts of a newsboy, or even from the conversation of passers-by in the street.

Before any supernormal theory, we must admit the possibility of a normal communication, however far-fetched it may seem. In each of the instances about to be related the fact of the dream was either recorded by the dreamer or related to a friend before the fact of any coincidence was suspected.

One of the best-known cases is that of Canon Warburton, who writes:

"Somewhere about the year 1848 I went up from Oxford to spend a
day or two with my brother, Acton Warburton, then a barrister,
living at 10 Fish Street, Lincoln's Inn. When I got to his
chambers I found a note on the table apologising for his
absence, and saying that he had gone to a dance somewhere in
the West End, and intended to be home soon after one o'clock.
Instead of going to bed I dozed in an arm-chair, but started up
wide awake exactly at one, ejaculating: 'By Jove! he's down!'
and seeing him coming out of a drawing-room into a brightly
illuminated landing, catching his foot in the edge of the top
stair, and falling headlong, just saving himself by his elbows
and hands. (The house was one which I have never seen, nor did
I know where it was.) Thinking very little of the matter, I
fell a-doze again for half-an-hour and was awakened by my
brother suddenly coming in and saying, 'Oh, there you are! I
have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck as I ever
had in my life. Coming out of the ballroom I caught my foot,
and tumbled full-length down the stairs.'

"That is all. It may have been 'only a dream,' but I always
thought it must have been something more."

A member of the Society for Psychical Research narrates that on 7th October 1900 he woke abruptly in the small hours of the morning with a painful conviction upon him that his wife, who was that night sleeping in another part of the house, had burst a varicose vein in the calf of her leg, and that he could feel the swelled place three inches long:

"I wondered whether I ought to get up and go down to her room
on the first floor, and considered whether she would be able to
come up to me; but I was only partly awake, though in acute
distress. My mind had been suddenly roused, but my body was
still under the lethargy of sleep. I argued with myself that
there was sure to be nothing in it, that I should only disturb
her, and so shortly went off to sleep again.

"On going to her room this morning I said I had had a horrid
dream, which had woke me up, to the effect that she had burst a
varicose vein, of which just now care has to be taken. 'Why,'
she replied, 'I had just the same experience. I woke up at
2.15, feeling sure the calf of my leg was bleeding, and my
hand seemed to feel it when I put it there. I turned on the
light in alarm, noticing the time, and wondered if I should be
able to get up to thee, or whether I should have to wake the
housekeeper. Thou wast in the dream out of which I woke,
examining the place.'

"Though I did not note the hour, two o'clock is about the time
I should have guessed it to be; and the impression on my mind
was vivid and terrible, knowing how dangerous such an accident
would be."

The foregoing is thus corroborated by the lady:

"I felt twinges of pain in my leg off and on in my sleep
without being entirely roused till about 2.15 A.M. Then, or
just before, I dreamt or had a vivid impression that a vein had
burst, and that my husband, who was sleeping in another room up
another flight of stairs, was there and called my attention to
it. I thought it felt wet, and trickling down the leg as if
bleeding, passed my hand down, and at first thought it seemed
wet; but on gaining fuller consciousness found it all right,
and that it was not more painful than often when I got out and
stood on it. Thought over the contingency of its actually
bursting, and whether I could so bandage it in that case as to
make it safe to go up to my husband's room, and thought I could
do so.

"Looking at my watch, found it about 2.20."

As to dreams in which a death occurs there is a vast mass of testimony. The late Dr Hodgson, on 19th July 1897, received the following letter:--

"DEAR HODGSON,--Five minutes ago Mr J. F. Morse, who has all
his life had dreams which were more or less verified later,
came to my room and said: 'I believe my wife died last night,
for I had a dream of a most remarkable nature which indicates
it. I shall be able to let you know soon, for I shall get word
at my office when I reach there. I will then send you word.'
His wife is in a country place in Delaware Co. Pa. She is ill,
but he had no idea she would not live for months, as the
enclosed letter of July 15th will show; but she was ill, and
would be likely to decline slowly and gradually. I will get
this off or in the mail before I hear any more.

"Mr Morse in his appearance looks like one who had just lost a
dear friend, and is in a state of great mental depression, with
tears in his eyes....

"M. L. HOLBROOK."

On the evening of the same day a telegram was received announcing the unexpected death of Mrs Morse at 9.15 on the evening of Friday, 16th July.

A prominent Chicago journalist, Mr F. B. Wilkie, reported that his wife asked him one morning in October 1885, while still engaged in dressing, and before either of them had left their sleeping-room, if he knew anyone named Edsale or Esdale. A negative reply was given and then a "Why do you ask?" She replied: "During the night I dreamt that I was on the lake-shore and found a coffin there, with the name of Edsale or Esdale on it, and I am confident that someone of that name has recently been drowned there." On opening the morning paper the first item that attracted his attention was the report of the mysterious disappearance from his home in Hyde Park of a young man named Esdale. A few days afterwards the body of a young man was found on the lake-shore.

This case was carefully investigated and authenticated by Dr Hodgson, and bears some unusual features.

Of dreams that may be reasonably regarded as telepathic the following is a striking example. It is contributed to "Phantasms of the Living" by a Mrs Hilton--a lady engaged in active work, and not in any respect a "visionary."

"234 Burdett Road, E.

"April 10th, 1883.

"The dream which I am about to relate occurred about two years
ago. I seemed to be walking in a country road, with high grassy
banks on either side. Suddenly I heard the tramp of many feet.
Feeling a strange sense of fear I called out: 'Who are these
people coming?' A voice above me replied: 'A procession of the
dead.' I then found myself on the bank, looking into the road
where the people were walking five or six abreast. Hundreds of
them passed by me--neither looking aside nor looking at each
other. They were people of all conditions and in all ranks of
life. I saw no children amongst them. I watched the long line
of people go away into the far distance, but I felt no special
interest in any of them, until I saw a middle-aged Friend,
dressed as a gentleman farmer. I pointed to him and called out:
'Who is that, please?' He turned round and called out in a loud
voice: 'I am John M., of Chelmsford.' Then my dream ended. Next
day when my husband returned from the office he told me that
John M., of Chelmsford, had died the previous day.

"I may add that I only knew the Friend in question by sight and
cannot recollect ever speaking to him.

"MARIE HILTON."

About a year later Mrs Hilton experienced a dream of a similar kind, again coincident with the death of an acquaintance seen in the phantom procession. It is worth noting "remarks Mr Gurney," that these dreams--for all their _bizarrerie_--seem to belong to a known type.

In another category of phenomena belong precognitive dreams in which certain events, especially deaths, are foretold. Mr Alfred Cooper, of 9 Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square, W., states, and his statement is attested by the Duchess of Hamilton, that:

"A fortnight before the death of the late Earl of L----, in
1882, I called upon the Duke of Hamilton in Hill Street to see
him professionally. After I had finished seeing him we went
into the drawing-room where the Duchess was, and the Duke said
to me: 'Oh, Cooper, how is the Earl?'

"The Duchess said: 'What Earl?' and on my answering: 'Lord
L----,' she replied, 'That is very odd. I have had a most
extraordinary vision. I went to bed, but after being in bed a
short time, I was not exactly asleep, but thought I saw a scene
as if from a play before me. The actors in it were Lord L----,
in a chair, as if in a fit, with a man standing over him with a
red beard. He was by the side of a bath, over which bath a red
lamp was distinctly shown.'

"I then said: 'I am attending Lord L---- at present; there is
very little the matter with him; he is not going to die; he
will be all right very soon.'

"Well, he got better for a week and was nearly well, but at the
end of six or seven days after this I was called to see him
suddenly. He had inflammation of both lungs.

"I called in Sir William Jenner, but in six days he was a dead
man. There were two male nurses attending him; one had been
taken ill. But when I saw the other the dream of the Duchess
was exactly represented. He was standing near a bath over the
Earl, and, strange to say, his beard was red. There was the
bath with the red lamp over it, it is rather rare to find a
bath with a red lamp over it, and this brought the story to my
mind.

"The vision seen by the Duchess was told two weeks before the
death of Lord L----. It is a most remarkable thing. This
account, written in 1888, has been revised by the late Duke of
Manchester, father of the Duchess of Hamilton, who heard the
vision from his daughter on the morning after she had seen it.

"MARY HAMILTON.

"ALFRED COOPER."

Mr Myers adds:

"The Duchess only knew Lord L---- by sight, and had not heard
that he was ill. She knew she was not asleep, for she opened
her eyes to get rid of the vision, and, shutting them, saw the
same thing again.

"An independent and concordant account has been given to me (F.
W. H. M.) orally by a gentleman to whom the Duchess related the
dream on the morning after its occurrence."

One of the most interesting and well-authenticated cases of dreams foretelling a death is that of Mr Fred Lane, understudy to that popular actor the late William Terriss. His statement is as follows:--

"Adelphi Theatre,

"December 20th, 1897.

"In the early morning of December 16th, 1897, I dreamt that I
saw the late Mr Terriss lying in a state of delirium or
unconsciousness on the stairs leading to the dressing-rooms in
the Adelphi Theatre. He was surrounded by people engaged at the
theatre, amongst whom were Miss Millward and one of the footmen
who attend the curtain, both of whom I actually saw a few hours
later at the death scene. His chest was bare and clothes torn
aside. Everybody who was around him was trying to do something
for his good. This dream was in the shape of a picture. I saw
it like a tableau on which the curtain would rise and fall. I
immediately after dreamt that we did not open at the Adelphi
Theatre that evening. I was in my dressing-room in the dream,
but this latter part was somewhat incoherent. The next morning,
on going down to the theatre for rehearsal, the first member of
the company I met was Miss H----, to whom I mentioned this
dream. On arriving at the theatre I also mentioned it to
several other members of the company including Messrs Creagh
Henry, Buxton, Carter Bligh, etc. This dream, though it made
such an impression upon me as to cause me to relate it to my
fellow-artists, did not give me the idea of any coming
disaster. I may state that I have dreamt formerly of deaths of
relatives and other matters which have impressed me, but the
dreams have never impressed me sufficiently to make me repeat
them the following morning, and have never been verified. My
dream of the present occasion was the most vivid I have ever
experienced; in fact, lifelike, and exactly represented the
scene as I saw it at night."

Three members of the company--Mr Carter Bligh, Mr Creagh Henry, and Miss H---- --made statements that Mr Lane related his dream in their presence on the morning of 16th December. Mr Lane was in the vicinity of the Adelphi Theatre when the murderer, named Prince or Archer, who had been employed as a super at the theatre, stabbed Terriss at the stage entrance to the theatre. The actor was taken to the Charing Cross Hospital, where he died almost immediately. It is interesting to note that it was Lane himself who ran to the hospital for the doctor, and on his return looked in at the stage entrance and saw Terriss lying on the stairs just as he had seen him in the dream.

While I am fully alive to the possibilities of coincidence, there certainly does not seem to be much besides levity in the theory that "it happened to be Jones's hour to see a hallucination of Thompson when it happened to be Thompson's hour to die," especially when, as frequently happens, the hallucination occurs more than once to the same percipient.

A Parisian journalist, M. Henri Buisson, sends to "The Annals of Psychical Science" an account of three premonitory dreams all of which were told to others before they were fulfilled. In the first, which occurred on June 8th, 1887, M. Buisson saw his grandmother "stretched dead on her bed, with a smile on her face as if she slept." Above the bed, in a brilliant sun, he read the date, "June 8th, 1888," just a year later; and on that day his grandmother died quite suddenly, with her face as calm as he had seen it in his dream.

On another occasion M. Buisson saw his mother, not dead, but very ill, and attended by a doctor, who had died more than a year before, after having been the family physician for thirty years. The next day M. Buisson received a telegram saying that his mother was ill, and, in fact, she died during the day.

In April 1907, M. Buisson dreamt that he received notice to quit his house on pretence of a message from the Prefect of Police, and that on looking out of the window he saw the Prefect in the street, dressed in a leather jacket, with a soft hat, and a slipper on one foot. He also dreamt that a fire had broken out. On the evening of the next day he heard the fire-engines, and on following them he found the Prefect on the spot, dressed just as in the dream, having hurt one foot, he had to go about in a slipper.

Of still another type is the clairvoyant dream. The following is related by Mr Herbert J. Lewis, of Cardiff:--

"In September 1880 I lost the landing-order of a large steamer
containing a cargo of iron ore, which had arrived in the port
of Cardiff. She had to commence discharging at six o'clock the
next morning. I received the landing-order at four o'clock in
the afternoon, and when I arrived at the office at six I found
that I had lost it. During all the evening I was doing my
utmost to find the officials of the Customs House to get a
permit, as the loss was of the greatest importance, preventing
the ship from discharging. I came home in a great degree of
trouble about the matter, as I feared that I should lose my
situation in consequence.

"That night I dreamt that I saw the lost landing-order lying in
a crack in the wall under a desk in the Long Room of the
Customs House.

"At five the next morning I went down to the Customs House and
got the keeper to get up and open it. I went to the spot of
which I had dreamt, and found the paper in the very place. The
ship was not ready to discharge at her proper time, and I went
on board at seven and delivered the landing-order, saving her
from all delay.

"I can certify to the truth of the above statement,

"HERBERT J. LEWIS,

"THOMAS LEWIS

"(Herbert Lewis's father).

"H. WALLIS."

(Mr E. J. Newell, of the George and Abbotsford Hotel, Melrose, adds the following corroborative note.)

"August 14th, 1884.

"I made some inquiries about Mr Herbert Lewis's dream before I
left Cardiff. He had been searching throughout the room in
which the order was found. His theory as to how the order got
in the place in which it was found is that it was probably put
there by someone (perhaps with malicious intent), as he does
not see how it could have fallen so.

"The fact that Mr H. Lewis is exceedingly short-sighted adds
to the probability of the thing which you suggest, that the
dream was simply an unconscious act of memory in sleep. On the
other hand, he does not believe it was there when he searched.

"E. J. NEWELL."

Now, it seems to me in the above case that the dreamer's subliminal self may have taken note of the lost landing-order without his super-consciousness being aware of it, and that the fact returned to him in his dream.

In R. L. Stevenson's "Across the Plains" may be found a striking chapter on dreams. It contains an account of some of the most successful dream experiments ever recorded. Stevenson's dreams were of no ordinary character; they were always of great vividness, and often of a markedly recurrent type. This faculty he developed to an unusual degree--to such an extent, indeed, that it became of great assistance to him in his work. By self-suggestion before sleep, we are told, the great novelist would secure "a visual and dramatic intensity of dream-representation which furnished him with the motives of some of his most striking romances." But "R. L. S." is not the only one who has secured assistance of dreams. Here is an account given by a German, Professor Hilprecht, of an experience of a similar nature ("Human Personality," i. 376):

"One Saturday evening, about the middle of March 1893, I had
been wearying myself, as I had done so often in the weeks
preceding, in the vain attempt to decipher two small fragments
of agate, which were supposed to belong to the finger-rings of
some Babylonian. The labour was much increased by the fact that
the fragments presented remnants only of characters and lines,
that dozens of similar small fragments had been found in the
ruins of the temple of Bel at Nippur with which nothing could
be done, that in this case furthermore I never had the
originals before me, but only a hasty sketch made by one of the
members of the expedition sent by the University of
Pennsylvania to Babylonia. I could not say more than that the
fragments, taking into consideration the place in which they
were found and the peculiar characteristics of the cuneiform
characters preserved upon them, sprang from the Cassite period
of Babylonian history (_circa_ 1700-1140 B.C.); moreover, as
the first character of the third line of the first fragment
seemed to be KU, I ascribed this fragment, with an
interrogation point, to King Kurigalzu, while I placed the
other fragment as unclassifiable with other Cassite fragments
upon a page of my book where I published the unclassifiable
fragments. The proofs already lay before me, but I was far from
satisfied. The whole problem passed yet again through my mind
that March evening before I placed my mark of approval under
the last correction in the book. Even then I had come to no
conclusion. About midnight, weary and exhausted, I went to bed
and was soon in deep sleep. Then I dreamed the following
remarkable dream. A tall, thin priest of the old pre-Christian
Nippur, about forty years of age and clad in a simple abba, led
me to the treasure chamber of the temple, on its south-east
side. He went with me into a small low-ceiled room, without
windows, in which there was a large wooden chest, while scraps
of agate and lapis-lazuli lay scattered on the floor. Here he
addressed me as follows:--'The two fragments which you have
published separately upon pages 22 and 26, belong together, are
not finger-rings, and their history is as follows. King
Kurigalzu (_circa_ 1300 B.C.) once sent to the temple of Bel,
among other articles of agate and lapis-lazuli, an inscribed
votive cylinder of agate. Then we priests suddenly received the
command to make for the statue of the god Ninib a pair of
earrings of agate. We were in great dismay, since there was no
agate as raw material at hand. In order to execute the command
there was nothing for us to do but cut the votive cylinder into
three parts, thus making three rings, each of which contained a
portion of the original inscription. The first two rings served
as earrings for the statue of the god; the two fragments which
have given you so much trouble are portions of them. If you
will put the two together you will have confirmation of my
words. But the third ring you have not yet found in the course
of your excavations and you never will find it.' With this the
priest disappeared. I awoke at once and immediately told my
wife the dream, that I might not forget it. Next
morning--Sunday--I examined the fragments once more in the
light of these disclosures, and to my astonishment found all
the details of the dream precisely verified in so far as the
means of verification were in my hands. The original
inscription on the votive cylinder read: 'To the god Ninib, son
of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented
this.' The problem was at last solved."