Occultism and Common Sense Part 4

"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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sistance of dreams. Here is an account given by a German, Professor Hilprecht, of an experience of a similar nature ("Human Personality," i. 376):

"One Sat.u.r.day 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 Ca.s.site 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 uncla.s.sifiable with other Ca.s.site fragments upon a page of my book where I published the uncla.s.sifiable fragments. The proofs already lay before me, but I was far from satisfied. The whole problem pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented this.' The problem was at last solved."

CHAPTER V

HALLUCINATIONS

From the occurrence in a dream of the ideas of events which happen to coincide with actual events, let us turn to apparitions occurring during the waking hours of the percipient.

The late Professor Sidgwick, at the head of a committee, sent out the following question to 17,000 educated persons not known to have had hallucinations:--"Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice, which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?"

The replies demonstrate how frequent are hallucinations amongst healthy, normal-minded persons. No fewer than 1684, or one in ten, of the persons interrogated, had had visual and auditory and even tactile hallucinations, realistic human phantoms, and other apparitions. We find that, according to the age cla.s.sification, of 1295 visual hallucinations 72 occurred while the percipients were under ten years of age, 217 between the ages of ten and nineteen, 300 between twenty and twenty-nine, 143 between thirty and thirty-nine, 81 between forty and forty-nine, 40 between fifty and fifty-nine, 22 between sixty and sixty-nine, 5 later than seventy, and 415 at unstated ages. Some of the hallucinations occurred immediately after waking, others while the percipients were awake in bed; but the great bulk occurred in a fully awakened state, and a large number appeared out of doors.

Of hallucinations of which we may say that they are due to a projection from the agent's mind, commonly to a dying man or woman, to that of the percipient, perhaps one of the most famous is that of Lord Charles Beresford, as described by him to the Society for Psychical Research:

"It was in the spring of 1864, whilst on board H.M.S. _Rac.o.o.n_, between Gibraltar and Ma.r.s.eilles, that I went into my office on the main deck to get a pipe; and as I opened the door I saw my father lying in his coffin as plainly as I could. It gave me an awful jerk and I immediately told some of the fellows who were smoking just outside the usual place between the guns, and I also told dear old Onslow, our chaplain. A few days after we arrived at Ma.r.s.eilles, and I heard of my father's death, and he had been buried that very day and at the time, half-past twelve in the day. I may add that at the time it was a bright, sunny day, and I had not been fretting about my father, as the latest news I had of him was that although very ill he was better. My dear old father and I were great chums, more so than is usual between a man of seventy-two and a boy of twenty, our respective ages then."

The evidence is so bulky that we may quote only a case here and there at random:

"On December 9th 1882 Mr T. G. Keulemans was living with his family in Paris. The outbreak of an epidemic of smallpox caused him to remove three of his children, including a favourite little boy of five, to London, whence he received in the course of the ensuing month several letters giving an excellent account of their health.

"On the 24th of January 1881, at half-past seven in the morning, I was suddenly awoke by hearing his voice, as I fancied, very near me. I saw a bright opaque white ma.s.s before my eyes, and in the centre of this light I saw the face of my little darling, his eyes bright, his mouth smiling. The apparition, accompanied by the sound of his voice, was too short and too sudden to be called a dream; it was too clear, too decided, to be called an effect of the imagination. So distinctly did I hear his voice that I looked round the room to see whether he was actually there. The sound I heard was that of extreme delight, such as only a happy child can utter. I thought it was the moment he woke up in London, happy and thinking of me. I said to myself: 'Thank G.o.d, little Isidore is happy as always.' Mr Keulemans describes the ensuing day as one of peculiar brightness and cheerfulness. He took a long walk with a friend, with whom he dined; and was afterwards playing a game at billiards when he again saw the apparition of his child. This made him seriously uneasy, and in spite of having received within three days the a.s.surance of his child's perfect health he expressed to his wife a conviction that he was dead. Next day a letter arrived saying that the child was ill; but the father was convinced that this was only an attempt to break the news; and, in fact, the child had died, after a few hours' illness, at the exact time of the first apparition."

Another case as recited by Madame D----, of St Gaudens, is to be found in "Posthumous Humanity." She says:

"I was still a young girl, and slept with my elder sister. One evening we had just retired to bed and blown out the light. The smouldering fire on the hearth still feebly lighted the room.

Upon turning my eyes towards the fireplace I perceived, to my amazement, a priest seated before the fire and warming himself.

He had the corpulence, the features, and the general appearance of one of our uncles who lived in the neighbourhood, where he was an archbishop. I at once called my sister's attention. She looked in the same direction, and saw the same apparition. She also recognised our uncle. An indescribable terror seized us both, and we cried 'Help!' with all our might. My father, who slept in an adjoining room, awakened by these desperate cries, jumped out of bed and ran in with a candle in his hand. The phantom had disappeared, and we saw no one in the room. The next morning a letter was received informing us that our uncle had died the previous evening.