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Dreams and the supernatural. A description of theories and early thoughts about dreams and the supernatural.
Dreams and the Supernatural
Dreams and the Supernatural
No account of the state of the mind in sleep would be complete with out an analysis of certain ex ceptional types of dream which seemingly are not to be explained in accordance with the principles stated above, and the con tents of which are such as to give rise to a widespread belief that there is something supernatural in them. There are dreams, for example, in which notable conceptions in art, literature, or science are presented to the dreamer, and remembered by him with such clearness that they may be after wards converted into permanent products of the mind. There are other dreams in which problems that have baffled the dreamer's earnest endeavor while awake are instantaneously and often most dramati cally solved for him while he sleeps. Akin to these are dreams in which the hiding places of lost articles are mysteriously made known. And, finally, there are dreams in which information is gained of events occurring at a distance from the dreamer, and sometimes of events whose occurrence is still a thing of the future.
Of these four classes of unusual dreams, an abundance of instances might be men tioned. It is well known that the late Robert Louis Stevenson obtained through dreams the plots for some of his best stories, including the weird but immortal "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" ; Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is another famous dream composi tion; while Tartini's "Devil's Sonata" was the result of a dream in which the devil appeared to Tartini and played the sonata to which the composer gave that name. The same element of dramatic impersona tion appears even more strikingly in the singular experience of Professor H. V. Hilprecht, to whom there was revealed in sleep the solution of a seemingly in soluble archaeological problem. Professor Hilprecht's account of his dream has often been quoted, but it is so much to the point in the present connection that it will bear repetition :
"One Saturday evening about the middle of March, 1893," he says, "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 labor was much increased by the fact that the frag ments 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, and that in this case, furthermore, I had 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 considera tion the place in which they were found and the peculiar characteristics of the cunei form characters preserved upon them, sprang from the Cassite period of Baby lonian history (about 1700-1140 B.C.). Moreover, as the first character of the third line 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 Cas site fragments, upon a page of my book where I published the unclassifiable frag ments. 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 this remarkable dream :
"A tall, thin priest of the old pre-Chris tian Nippur, about forty years of age, and clad in a simple abba, led me to the treasure chamber of the temple, on its southeast 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 :
'These 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 (about 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 com mand 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 con tained 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 will never 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 verifica tion 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 solving of mathematical problems in sleep would seem to be of especially fre quent occurrence. I know of one case in which a stiff problem in differential calculus was worked out in a dream. An English engineer, Mr. F. J. Jones, has reported that he once dreamed the answer, "a number with several places of decimals," to a prob lem which had long baffled him. In another case a business man who had been trying for two months to correct an error in his cash accounts had a vivid dream in which the mistake was shown to be due to a complicated cross-entry. While still asleep he got out of bed and made a memor andum on a slip of paper, for the purpose of helping him to make the necessary cor rection the next day. Oddly enough, when he awoke in the morning, he forgot all about the dream and the memorandum. But that evening, while shaving for dinner, he chanced to pick up the slip to wipe his razor, saw the memorandum on it, and at once remembered his dream.
"The effect on me," he states, "was such that I returned to our office and turned to the cash-book, where I found that I had really, when asleep, detected the error which I could not detect in my waking hours, and had actually jotted it down." 1
Sometimes the dream action involves, at one and the same time, the solving of a problem and an actual work of creation. I cite from my recently published book, " Ad ventarings in the Psychical," a typical case communicated to me by the dreamer himself, Mr. B. J. S. Cahill, a leading Pacific Coast architect.
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VIII, p.
Mr. Cahill had been commissioned to design a twenty-six-story office building, to be erected in Portland, Oregon, and he determined, if possible, to plan one that would be a real contribution towards the solution of some of the most difficult prob lems of modern commercial architecture. For weeks he labored hard to devise a building that would unite a maximum of beauty, solidity, and capacity, with an abundance and as nearly as possible an equality of light and air for the many offices it was to contain. The structure he ulti mately conceived was certainly novel, and differed conspicuously from the ordinary four-sided office building, with its inner offices lighted from a court.
His plan called for the construction of a building shaped much like a St. Andrew's cross, or like a square with a triangle cut out of each side. In this way the need for an inner court was completely obviated, and the only poorly ventilated and dimly lighted portion of the building would be its central " core." Here the elevators and stairs were to be located.
According to the architect's own state ment, this plan which was highly praised by so eminent a critic as Mr. Montgomery Schuyler was born in his mind while he slept. One night he saw in a dream a build ing shaped in this fashion, and knew that his problem was solved. He tells me that on awaking he made two rough sketches of the plan in a pocket note-book one showing the general design, the other in dicating the appearance of the building when completed.
As to the revelation in dream of the whereabouts of lost articles, I would also cite from my book, " Adventurings in the Psychical," an exceptionally interesting case reported to me by a young lady attending college at Greeley, Colorado. Her father had sent her a check, which for a day or two she delayed cashing. Then, being without money, she looked for it in the place where she supposed she had put it, but, to her dismay, discovered that it was not there. A thorough search of her room failed to bring it to light, and, as it was not a personal check of her father's, she was greatly worried, thinking that it might be impossi ble to duplicate it.
A couple of nights later she had a curious dream in which she saw herself standing in front of a bookcase in the college library. On a certain shelf were five books, one bound in blue, another in yellow, and be tween them three with a white binding. She took down one of the white-covered volumes, opened it idly, and in the middle of the book found her check.
Next morning she awoke with no memory of the dream, nor did she recall it when, later in the day, she visited the college library and came across this identical placing of books. It recurred to her only when she glanced into one of the white-covered volumes. Feeling rather " foolish " and also not a little apprehensive, she took down a second volume of the same set, opened it, and there, sure enough, was the missing check !
On the same order is a dream reported from Guilford, Vermont, to the late Pro fessor James. In this instance the dreamer, Mr. J. L. Squires, was a young man in the employment of a Guilford farmer, T. L. Johnson. Narrating his singular experience to Professor James, Mr. Squires said :
"In the month of September, 1887, I was about one mile from the farm buildings with a young man named Wesley Davis with whom I had for several years been acquainted, and who had been working with me for several months at said John son's looking after some cattle that had strayed from a pasture. The cattle, eighteen or twenty head, were found in a large mow lot, and, seeing us, started to run away in a direction opposite to that in which we wished to drive them.
"In order to head off the cattle and turn them back, Davis ran one way and I the other, and while running Davis lost his watch and chain from his vest pocket, but did not discover his loss until eight or nine o'clock that night, when it was, of course, too late to search for it. Believing that he must have lost the watch while engaged in getting the cattle back into the pasture, Davis and myself returned to the place the next morning and looked for the watch all the forenoon.
"Not having any idea of the probable locality in which the watch was lost, and not being at all certain that it was lost while after the cattle, we did not succeed in find ing it, although we searched for it until twelve o'clock. The watch was one that Davis had for some time, and he was much attached to it, and felt very badly about his loss. He worked hard for his living, and could not afford to lose the watch, for which he had paid twenty-five dollars. I felt sorry for him, and thought about the watch continually all the afternoon after we returned from looking for it, and was still thinking of it when I went to sleep that night.
"During my sleep, at what hour I could not tell, I saw the watch as it lay upon the ground in the mow lot, over a mile away. It was in grass at least ten inches high. The face of the watch was turned up, and the small steel chain which was attached to it lay like a curve in a half circle. About three feet from the watch was a large spot where the grass had been crushed and matted by a creature lying down ; about ten rods to the north was a brush fence ; about ten or twelve feet to the eastward of the watch was a granite cobblestone one or two feet in diameter, which lay about half out of the ground.
"When I awoke the next morning, which was Sunday, I felt as certain that I could go straight to the watch as if I had really
seen it, and told Davis so, and tried to have him go out and get it. He had no faith in my 'vision/ 'dream/ or whatever it may be called, and would not go. In spite of the jests and laughter of the entire family, I saddled a horse and went directly to the watch, which I found with all its surroundings exactly as I had seen it. I was not nearer than forty rods to Davis when the watch was lost, as I ascertained after it was found.
"The watch had run down and stopped, the hands pointing to 9.40 o'clock, which I also noted in my dream."
Compare with this the following state ment communicated to the American Society for Psychical Research by Profes sor Josiah Royce, of Harvard University, as coming from a trustworthy lady of his acquaintance :
"A number of years ago I was invited to visit a friend who lived at a large and beau tiful country-seat on the Hudson. Shortly after my arrival I started, with a number of other guests, to make a tour of the very extensive grounds. We walked for an hour or more, and thoroughly explored the place. Upon my return to the house I discovered that I had lost a gold cuff -stud that I valued for association's sake. I merely remem bered that I wore it when we started out, and did not think of or notice it again until my return, when it was missing. As it was quite dark, it seemed useless to search for it, especially as it was the season of autumn and the ground was covered with dead leaves.
"That night I dreamed that I saw a with ered grape-vine clinging to a wall, and with a pile of dead leaves at its base. Under neath the leaves, in my dream, I distinctly saw my stud gleaming.
"The following morning I asked the friends with whom I had been walking the previous afternoon if they remembered see ing any such wall and vine, as I did not.
They replied that they could not recall any thing answering the description. I did not tell them why I asked, as I felt somewhat ashamed of the dream, but during the morn ing I made some excuse to go out in the grounds alone. I walked hither and thither, and after a long time I suddenly came upon the wall and vine exactly as they looked in my dream. I had not the slightest recollection of seeing them or pass ing by them on the previous day. The dead leaves at the base were lying heaped up, as in my dream. I approached cau tiously, feeling rather uncomfortable and decidedly silly, and pushed them aside. I had scattered a large number of leaves when a gleam of gold struck my eye, and there lay the stud exactly as in my dream."
Professor Royce's informant adds that this experience will always be remembered by her as something "uncanny." Similarly, the young lady who found her check in the book in the college library informs me that the dream which enabled her to find it has troubled her greatly, and it is evident that she is inclined to regard it as a super natural manifestation. It would not be difficult to imagine her state of mind had the dream taken some such form as that reported by Professor Hilprecht; or if, as has been known to happen, the desired in formation had been given by a vision of the "ghost" of some deceased relative. There is, for instance, the strange dream of Miss Elizabeth Conley, occurring I'm mediately after the death of her father, an Iowa farmer, who had gone from his home, near Ionia, to Dubuque on business, had been found dead in a hotel shed, and had been taken to the morgue, where, after the inquest, his body was made ready for shipment home.
The clothes he had been wearing were so old, torn, and soiled that they were dis carded, made into a bundle, and left in the morgue yard to be disposed of later. But the next day, when Mr. Conley's son reached Ionia with the body, he was asked by his sister Elizabeth what had been done with their father's clothes.
"Father came to me in a dream," she declared, "and told me that after leaving home he had sewed a roll of bills inside his shirt, in a pocket made with a piece of my red dress."
The brother, not unnaturally, doubted the value of a statement coming from such a source, but his sister was so wrought up that the family physician advised him to return to Dubuque and make inquiry, if only to set her mind at rest. There followed the discovery that a pocket had, in fact, been sewed inside the shirt with a piece of red cloth, awkwardly stitched as by a man's hand, and that it contained thirty dollars in bills.
From a dream like this it is but a slight transition to the last of our four classes of exceptional dreams to dreams, that is to
say, in which information would seem to be supernaturally given of events occurring at a distance from the dreamer, and of events of future occurrence. In the main such dreams are concerned with coincidental or impending misfortune, and there is fre quently a vivid presentation of the person chiefly concerned, with sometimes a more or less detailed view of the attendant cir cumstances. Thus Canon Warburton, re porting an experience of his youth, relates that he once dreamed of seeing his brother coming out of a ball-room in a distant part of London and falling down the stairs. Half an hour later he was joined by the brother, who told him of a narrow' escape he had had from serious injury by a fall in the manner seen in the dream.
Or, if it is a case of death coincidence, the "ghost" of the dead person may appear to the dreamer, and may even be heard to speak, as in a weird experience narrated by a reputable London business man to Mrs. Eleanor Sidgwick, widow of the distin guished scholar Henry Sidgwick. This business man had formerly made his home in Glasgow, where he had a large manu facturing plant, still operated by him at the time of the dream. Among his em ployees was a Robert Mackenzie, who had been in his service for many years, and in whose welfare he was much interested. On the Saturday before the dream the em ployees of the factory had their annual ball. The following Tuesday, the manu facturer affirms :
"I dreamed, but with no vagueness, as in common dreams, no blurring of outline or rapid passages from one thing discon nectedly to another, that I was seated at a desk, engaged in a business conversation with an unknown gentleman, who stood on my right hand. Towards me, in front, advanced Robert Mackenzie, and, feeling annoyed, I addressed him with some asperity, asking him if he did not see that I was engaged. He retired to a short distance with exceeding reluctance, and turned again to approach me, as if most desirous of an immediate colloquy, when I spoke to him still more sharply as to his want of manners. On this, the person with whom I was con versing took his leave, and Mackenzie once more came forward.
"'What is all this, Robert?' I asked, somewhat angrily. 'Did you not see that I was engaged?'
'Yes, sir,' he replied; 'but I must speak with you at once.'
'"What about?' I said. 'What is it that can be so important?'
"I wish to tell you, sir,' he answered, 'that I am accused of doing a thing I did not do, and that I want you to know it, and I tell you so, and that you are to for give me for what I am blamed for, because I was innocent.'
" Then, ' I did not do the thing they say I did.'
"I said, 'What?' Getting the same an swer. I then naturally asked :
"But how can I forgive you if you do not tell me what you are accused of?'
"I can never forget the emphatic manner of his answer, in the Scottish dialect :
"'Ye'llsuneken.'
: 'This question and the answer were repeated at least twice I am certain the answer was repeated thrice, in the most fer vent tone. On that I awoke, and was in that state of surprise and bewilderment which such a remarkable dream might in duce, and was wondering what it all meant, when my wife burst into my bedroom, much excited, and, holding an open letter in her hand, exclaimed :
" 'Oh, James ! Here's a terrible end to the workman's ball : Robert Mackenzie has committed suicide ! '
"With a full conviction of the meaning of the vision, I at once quietly and firmly said: No, he has not committed suicide.' "How can you possibly know that?' "'Because he has just been here to tell me.'
Later word was received from the mana ger of the Glasgow establishment stating that, as a matter of fact, Mackenzie had not committed suicide, the evidence at the inquest showing that he had taken a drink by mistake from a bottle of poison, think ing it was whisky. from Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. Ill, pp. 95-98.
Again, the message of death or disaster may be apprehended in dream symboli cally, without the presence of the principal actor in the distant tragedy. I once re ceived a letter from a lady living in Brook lyn, describing an experience that strikingly illustrates this point. Her dream, however, was of such an intimate character that the names of the persons and places must be suppressed. Three years ago, this lady writes, her daughter became interested in a young man, Mr. V., whose suit, however, the mother discouraged. Afterwards her daughter met, fell in love w r ith, and was happily married to a physician in the Gov ernment service. She soon went abroad with her husband, to a remote and isolated post. My informant continues :
"We could not hear from them all winter because they were ice-bound, but my thoughts of them were always most de lightful, for their last letters were bubbling over with happiness, and I was lovingly busy getting things ready for them.
"Mr. V. had almost passed from my mind, when one morning, in the middle of June, I arose, took a bath, and, having a half-hour to spare, went back to bed again, falling into a deep sleep.
"Suddenly Mr. V. appeared to me in one of my lower rooms. It seemed to be breakfast time, and I invited him to have some. He accepted, and we sat together for some time, but I do not remember any of our conversation. Suddenly he arose, faced me, and, looking straight into my eyes, said emphatically :
" ' Now she is mine ! Nothing you can do will ever separate us again ! This time she will belong to me ! '
"I awoke with a start, much frightened. Then, realizing the situation, I thanked Heaven she was safely married, and promptly put the dream from me. This was about eight o'clock. At ten a despatch reached me saying that my daughter's hus band had died, from the result of a boating accident, two weeks before."
Of dreams revealing events not of past or present but of future occurrence an aston ishingly large number with excellent creden tials have been recorded. Usually the pre monitory dream is one of death or illness, and generally concerns either the dreamer himself or one of his intimate friends. Sometimes it indicates a course of action which, if followed, will avert its fulfillment. Typical in this respect is the dream of a lady whom I will call Mrs. Z.
She dreamed that, driving in her brougham along a London street north of Piccadilly, the family coachman fell from the box and struck heavily on his head. Shortly before going to bed she had decided to drive next day to Woolwich, but the dream so disturbed her that she almost changed her mind. However, not wishing to seem superstitious, she went as planned.
Nothing happened until Piccadilly was reached on the return journey. Then Mrs. Z. noticed that other coachmen were staring at her carnage ; and, looking through the glass front of the brougham, she saw that her driver was leaning back in his seat, as though to restrain the horse. As the car riage turned out of Piccadilly the memory of her dream flashed into her mind. She ordered the brougham stopped, jumped out, and called to a near-by policeman to catch the coachman, which he did just as the latter swayed and fell from the box. It developed that he had been ill since the previous day, and had gradually fainted from exhaustion during the drive home.
On the other hand, there may be nothing in the least portentous in a premonitory dream ; it may be concerned only with some trivial or bizarre happening. This is too often overlooked by those who insist on seeing a supernatural agency at work in all exceptional dreams. There is one odd case, amply corroborated, in which a lady dreamed that on entering her drawing room after church, she saw five dark little spots on the new carpet, and that these turned out to be holes burned into the carpet. The next day was Sunday, and she went to church as usual. On her return she visited the drawing-room, where she found that a careless housemaid had dropped some hot coals on the carpet, causing five little burned patches. Akin to this is Mr. Frederick Greenwood's dream of the dead hand.
"One night," says Mr. Greenwood, "I dreamed that, making a call on some matter of business, I was shown into a fine great drawing-room and asked to wait. Accord ingly I went over to the fireplace, in the usual English way, preparing to wait there. And there, after the same fashion, I lounged with my arm upon the mantelpiece; but only for a few moments. For, feeling that my fingers had rested on something strangely cold, I looked, and saw that they lay on a dead hand : a woman's hand newly cut from the wrist.
"Though I woke in horror on the instant, this dream was quite forgotten at any rate, for the time when I did next day make a call on some unimportant matter of business, was shown into a pretty little room adorned with various knickknacks, and then was asked to wait. Glancing by chance toward the mantelpiece (the dream of the previous night still forgotten), what should I see but the hand of a mummy, broken from the wrist. It was a very little hand, and on it was a ring that would have been a 'gem ring' if the dull red stone in it had been genuinely precious. Wherefore I concluded that it was a woman's hand." 1 Neither this dream nor that of the burned holes in the carpet served any useful pur pose, or any purpose whatever. Yet they pointed as directly and vividly to future events as did Mrs. Z.'s dream, or as do the numerous dreams on record predicting the illness or death of the dreamer or of one of the dreamer's friends. There is reason, then, for inferring that the mechanism in all such cases is much the same. Either they are all "supernatural dreams" or there is nothing "supernatural" in any of them. On the other hand, they cannot be dismissed by raising the cry of "chance coincidence" or by insinuating that possibly the tellers of the dreams did not adhere strictly to the truth.
This is the so-called explanation advanced by many persons with respect to all four classes of the exceptional dreams described and illustrated above. They forget that people do not tell untruths that are likely to expose them to ridicule. There may be some few who, from a morbid desire for notoriety, do exaggerate and distort, or even concoct positive falsehoods in repre senting themselves as the heroes or heroines of experiences which they did not really have. But the prevailing tendency is to conceal, not to make public, dreams of the type in question.
Nothing, indeed, is more difficult than to induce people to go on record concerning such dreams. I am frequently in receipt of letters reporting them as personal ex periences, and almost always the writers be! Ray a profound dread of publicity. "Please consider this confidential," "I have not dared to tell this to any one before," "If you make any use of this I beg you not to mention my name," "I would not for worlds have my friends know of this, for they would think I was crazy" phrases like these recur with monotonous regularity. To psychical researchers it is a familiar story. There are undoubtedly creative, revelatory, monitory, and pre monitory dreams, but people who have them, since they can account for them only on the theory that "ghosts did it," do not care to make the facts public lest they be deemed superstitious or insane.
Yet, if they only knew it, modern science can give a satisfactory explanation for all exceptional dreams on other than "ghostly" grounds. Only a short time ago, it must be acknowledged, this could not have been said, but within recent years the develop ment of new methods of experiment and observation, and the systematic probing into the nature and possibilities of the human mind carried on alike by psycholo gists and psychical researchers have opened up vistas of knowledge far transcending those possessed by previous generations.
Assuming, then, that a given exceptional dream is vitiated neither by errors of memory nor by deliberate falsification, how would science explain it? What are the facts which science has to offer, enabling us to understand, without resort to the supernatural, how we can have dreams in which we arrive at great creative concep tions, solve difficult problems, trace lost articles, obtain information of events occur ring at a distance, and even gain glimpses into futurity?
There is, first, the fact that the processes of the mind in sleep closely parallel those of the waking consciousness. As was shown in the preceding chapter, we think, we reason, we exercise our imagination, in sleep in very much the same way as when awake. And, whether awake or asleep, much of our mental activity is "subconscious" in sleep, indeed, it is wholly so. We have the faculty, without conscious, voluntary effort, of drawing on the store house of our memory, recalling percepts sights, sounds, etc. of our waking life, and utilizing them as the material for a train of thought which, through a dream, provided that we remember it, may be consciously apprehended by us.
There is the further important consideration that, when awake, not only do we do much of our thinking subconsciously, but we also do much of our perceiving in the same way. Every sight and sound of the waking life, whether noticed or unnoticed, makes an impression on our mind, and may be afterwards recalled in memory. This, beyond any question, is one of the most significant of the discoveries of latter-day psychology, and its actuality has been proved time and again by scientific experiment. It has been found, for example, that when persons are hypnotized, they can recall in minute detail incidents of which they never had conscious knowledge, but which demon strably formed part of their past experi ences. The same principle has been other wise established through experiments with that peculiar method of inducing visual hallucinations known as crystal-gazing. There is in England a lady, Miss Goodrich Freer, a well-known member of the Society for Psychical Research, who has for years been experimenting in crystal vision, with the result of adding appreciably to scien tific knowledge of the workings of the mind. It would be tedious to quote at any length from the records of her experiments, 1 but some quotation may profitably be made, in order to give a clear idea of the marvelous possibilities of subconscious perception. On one occasion she reports :
These will be found in the Proceedings of the Society for Piychical Research, vol. V, pp. 488-521 ; vol. VIII, pp. 484-495.
" I saw in the crystal a pool of blood (as it seemed to me) lying on the pavement at the corner of a terrace close to my door. This suggested nothing to me. Then I re membered that I had passed over that spot in the course of a walk of a few hundred yards home from the circulating library ; and that, the street being empty, I had been looking into the books as I walked. After wards I found that my boots and the bottom of my dress were stained with red paint, which I must have walked through un observingly."
And again :
"I saw in the crystal a young girl, an inti mate friend, waving to me from her carriage. I observed that her hair, which had hung down her back when I last saw her, was now put up in young-lady fashion. Most certainly I had not consciously seen even the carriage, the look of which I knew very well. But next day I called on my friend ; was reproached by her for not having observed her as she passed ; and perceived that she had altered her hair in the way which the crystal had shown."
Once somebody suggested to Miss Good rich-Freer that she look in the crystal with the intention of seeing, not pictures, but words. She was immediately rewarded by the sight of what was obviously a news paper announcement.
"It reported," she states, "the death of a lady at one time a most frequent visitor in my circle, and very intimate with some of my nearest friends ; an announcement, therefore, which, had I consciously seen it, would have interested me considerably. I related my vision at breakfast, quoting name, date, place, and an allusion to 'a long period of suffering' borne by the de ceased lady, and added that I was sure that I had not heard any report of her illness, or even, for some months, any mention of her likely to suggest such a hallucination. I was, however, aware that I had the day before taken up the first sheet of the Times, but was interrupted before I had consciously read any announcement of death. Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, with whom I was staying, immediately sought for the paper, where we discovered the paragraph almost exactly as I had seen it."
Suppose that, instead of getting the infor mation of her friend's death by means of a little picture in a crystal, Miss Goodrich Freer had had a dream in which the dead friend appeared to her and solemnly said : "I have had a long period of suffering, but it is over now." And suppose that the next day word had been received of the friend's death, Miss Goodrich-Freer mean while having completely forgotten that she had glanced at the Times. Would this not have been on a par with many of the dreams that bring amazement and con sternation to their dreamers?
In truth, these two facts, of subconscious mentation and subconscious perception, are of themselves sufficient to account for by far the greater number of dreams that smack of the supernatural. Always, it is to be noted, the dreams of the first of our four classes, the creative dreams, are of a kind appropriate to the waking thoughts and activities of the dreamer. Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer of stories, gets the plots of stories in dream. He does not, like Tartini, get a "Devil's Sonata," nor yet the conception for a valuable innovation in commercial architecture, such as was dreamed by the Pacific Coast architect. The subconscious, after all, is closely linked to the conscious. Whatever chiefly con cerns a man's conscious thoughts will be the chief concern of his subconscious think ing, awake or asleep.
The artist will subconsciously think of subjects, colors, combinations ; the musi cian, of themes and harmonies ; the mathe matician, of mathematical theories and applications. Hence, too, when one's thoughts in sleep turn to the solution of problems rather than the exercise of creative imagination, the problems dealt with will invariably be those that are of greatest interest to the sleeper when awake.
Undoubtedly, though, subconscious per ception has a very special influence in many dreams that give the solution of problems. Professor Hilprecht, to return to one of our illustrative cases, had for weeks been striv ing to solve the riddle of the agate frag ments. Consciously he had formulated and rejected many tentative interpreta tions. All the while, his tireless poring over the problem was adding to the store of his subconscious as well as conscious percepts relating to it. Subconsciously he would be ever approaching closer to the solution which, in his case, was finally attained while he slept, being presented to him, in accordance with the recognized tendency of the sleeping consciousness to dramatize its material, in the form of a weird dream-story.
Precisely the same explanation would apply in the case of the business man to whom was revealed in dream the source of the baffling error in his cash account. So, likewise, in subconscious perception we have an adequate explanation for all dreams in which the hiding-place of some lost article is made known. The young lady in Greeley, so worried by the dream that aided her in recovering her lost check, tells me that after the recovery of the check she remembered that the book in which it was found had been in her room for some hours the day she received her father's letter. What happened, I have no doubt, was that she absent-mindedly slipped the check into the book, and then, so far as her upper consciousness was concerned, forgot all about it. But subconsciously she would remember as we know from experiments such as those carried on by Miss Goodrich Freer and subconsciously would be re minded of it the day before the dream when, in the college library, she happened to see the same book again, without, per chance, any conscious knowledge of seeing it. That night, in sleep, her mind busied itself once more with the problem of the missing check, this time to good purpose.
The application of the same principle to the similar cases cited by me need not long detain us. It is only necessary to assume, in the first case, that Mr. Squires, without being aware of the fact, saw the lost watch while searching for it in the hay-field ; and, in the second case, that Professor Royce's informant glimpsed her stud as it fell among the leaves, but did not consciously realize that it was her stud that had fallen. In both cases a memory of the incident and its setting would be subconsciously retained. In the case of Elizabeth Conley's dream, which is on the same order, it is altogether probable that Miss Conley had once known, but had forgotten, her father's intention to sew a pocket into his shirt.
Nor need we go beyond subconscious perception or, at most, telepathy be tween living minds to explain premoni tory dreams. 1 When it is a dream of dis ease or death impending for the dreamer, there is always the possibility that, as in my cat-clawing dream cited in the pre ceding chapter, disease had already so far progressed as to cause organic changes occasioning sensations too slight to be appreciated by the waking consciousness, but sufficient to stimulate the sleeping con sciousness to activity. When the dream
1 It must frankly be added that there are on record certain well-attested dreams of a "clairvoyant " character relatingtvi|H' cially to the recovery of the bodies of people who have died under circumstances seemingly unknown to any living person which appear to defy explanation on even a telepathic basis. But this does not necessarily mean that one must resort to a "ghostly" hypothesis to explain them. It may be that such dreams are evidential of an as yet unrecognized natural power of the human mind. This view, indeed, is vigorously maintained in a recent book, "On the Cosmic Relations," by Mr. Henry Holt; who, for that matter, would also apply his hypothesis of a "cosmic sense" to explain all dreams relates to the illness of some one other than the dreamer, it is safe to assume that, con sciously or subconsciously, an inkling of the state of that other person's health had been obtained by the dreamer before the dream.
Take Mrs. Z.'s peculiar dream of the fall ing coachman. Her own statement shows that the coachman had been quite ill the day before, and was in no condition to undertake a long drive. It is not unreason able to assume that Mrs. Z. noticed that he was not looking well, and subconsciously asked herself whether he would be fit to take her driving next day, a question which her subconsciousness answered by pre figuring an accident likely to occur under the circumstances.
The element of the marvelous is equally obliterated from such dreams as those of the dead hand and the holes burned in the carpet, when we take into consideration, as we are bound to do, the possibilities of subconscious mental action. Mr. Frederick Greenwood, thinking of the business call he had to make next day, would be re minded of the house he was to visit, and this would readily serve to evoke in his sleeping consciousness a memory of the mummy's hand on the mantelpiece. As to the dream of the holes in the carpet, the probability is that they were burned into the carpet the night before the dream, not the day after it, and that the dreamer saw them "out of the corner of her eye," as she passed the drawing-room on her way to bed. Otherwise her dream is inexplicable on any hypothesis, even that of "spirit agency." It is preposterous to imagine that "spirits" would trouble themselves with notifying anxious housewives of the imminence of trifling domestic mishaps. Another and more difficult problem is presented by well-authenticated dreams that involve coincidental action at a dis tance, although there is reason for believing that many even of these have a very simple explanation. To give a specific instance, the dream of the London business man relating to the alleged suicide of his em ployee, Mackenzie, was in all likelihood nothing more than the reaction of his sleeping consciousness to the news brought him by his wife when she rushed into the room. He was, as his account indicates, not more than half awake when he heard his wife's statement. Dreams, as we know, come quickly, and in a few seconds a com plicated dream-story can present itself to the mind. The business man, in a semi waking, semi-sleeping state, would subcon sciously protest against the accusation that an old and trusted employee, with whose character he was fully acquainted, had taken his own life ; and the subconscious protest would instantly frame itself as a dramatic dream.
This might also be said of the Brooklyn lady's dream symbolizing the death of her son-in-law, if only we could be sure that the news of the death was already known to other members of her household, so that she might have overheard them talking about it while taking her bath. Against such a possibility, however, has to be set her positive declaration that the despatch announcing the death was not received until two hours after the dream. Even so, it would not be necessary to introduce a ghostly agency as an explanatory factor. For there is the possibility that the news was conveyed to her mind from the mind of her sorrowing daughter by telepathy, or thought transference. The same process would explain Canon Warburton's dream of the accident to his brother.
But, it may be objected, if subconscious mental action is thus responsible for excep tional dreams, why do we not have them oftener? For just this reason, that, at bottom, they are exceptional with regard to their contents rather than their mechanism. Being dreams, they are subject to the laws of dreaming. Like any ordinary dream, they require an initial physical stimulus, whether internal or external. And when the stimulus is received, and the sleeping consciousness sets to work to in terpret it, it may very well happen that some emotional complex is so dominant in the sleeper's mind that the resultant inter pretation is of the ordinary, not the excep tional, type. Besides which, dreams are easily forgotten, and there is proof that exceptional dreams are no more likely to be remembered than any others. Even in the cases given in this chapter a large pro portion of the dreamers entirely forgot their dreams until some chance occurrence recalled them to mind. My own belief is that every one of us has, from time to time, exceptional dreams which fail to find remembrance in the waking state.
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