"Two friends arrive at Megara and take separate lodgings; one of them has hardly fallen asleep before he sees his travelling companion beside him, telling him sorrowfully that his host has formed a plan to assassinate him, and begging him to come to his assistance as quickly as possible. The other awakes; but satisfied that he has had a bad dream, loses no time in going to sleep again. His friend appears to him again, and conjures him to hasten, because the murderers are coming to his room. More puzzled, he is astonished at the persistency of this dream, and is on the point of going to his friend; but reason and fatigue triumph, and he goes to bed again. Then his friend comes to him for the third time, pale, bleeding, disfigured. 'Wretch,' said he to him, 'you did not come when I implored you; it is all over now. Avenge me. At sunrise you will meet a cart loaded with manure at the city gate: stop it, and order it to be unloaded; you will find my body hidden in the middle. Give me an honest burial, and pursue my murderers.' So great a tenacity, such minute details, admitted of no further delay or hesitation; the friend rises, hurries to the gate mentioned, finds the wagon there, stops the driver, who is frightened; and soon after the search begins, the body of his friend is found."
This story seemed to come expressly to strengthen my opinion in regard to the unknown quantities in the scientific problem. Doubtless hypotheses are not lacking in reply to the point in question. It may be said that perhaps the circumstance never happened as Cicero tells it, that it has been amplified and exaggerated; that two friends coming to a strange city may fear an accident, that fearing for a friend's life after the fatigue of a journey, in the middle of the quiet night, one might chance to dream that he is the victim of an assassin. As to the episode of the cart, the travellers may have seen one standing in their host's court-yard, and the principle of the association of ideas comes in to bring it into the dream. Yes, these explanatory hypotheses may be made; but they are only hypotheses. To admit that there had really been any communication between the dead man and the living one is also an hypothesis.
Are facts of this kind very rare? It seems not. I remember, among others, a story told me by an old friend of my boyish days, Jean Best, who, with my eminent friend Édouard Charton, founded the Magasin Pittoresque in 1883, and died a few years ago. He was a grave, cold, methodical man, a skilful typographical engraver, and a careful business man. Every one who knew him knows how little nervous he was by temperament, and how foreign to his mind were things of the imagination. Well, the following incident happened to him when he was a child between five and six years old.
It was at Toul, his native place. He was lying in his little bed one beautiful evening, but was not asleep, when he saw his mother come into his chamber, cross it, and go into the adjoining drawing-room, whose door was open, and where his father was playing cards with a friend. Now, his mother was ill at Pau at that time. He at once rose from his bed and ran to the drawing-room after his mother, where he looked for her in vain. His father scolded him somewhat impatiently, and sent him back to bed again, assuring him that he had been dreaming.
Then the child, thinking that he must have been dreaming, tried to go to sleep again. But some time afterwards, lying with his eyes open, he distinctly saw his mother pass him for the second time; only now he hurried to her and kissed her, and she at once disappeared. He did not want to go to bed afterwards, and remained in the drawing-room, where his father continued to play cards. His mother died at Pau the same day at that very hour.
I have this circumstance from M. Best himself, who remembered it clearly. How explain it? It may be said that, knowing his mother was ill, the child often thought of her, and had an hallucination which happened to coincide with his mother's death. That is possible. But it may be thought, too, that there was some sympathetic link between the mother and child, and at that solemn moment the mother's soul may really have been in communication with her child. How? one may ask. We know nothing about it. But what we do not know, is to what we know in the proportion of the ocean to a drop of water.
Hallucinations! That is easily said. How many medical works have been written upon this subject! Everybody knows that of Brierre de Boismont. Among the numberless incidents which it relates, let us cite the two following:
"Observation 84. When King James came to England at the time of the London plague, being at Sir Robert Cotton's house in the country with old Camden, he saw, in a dream, his oldest son, who was still a child living in London, with a bleeding cross on his forehead, as if he had been wounded by a sword. Frightened at this apparition, the king began to pray; in the morning he went to Camden's chamber and told him the events of the night; the latter reassured the monarch, telling him he had nothing to torment himself about. That very day the king received a letter from his wife announcing the death of his son, who had died from the plague. When the child appeared to his father, he had the height and proportions of a grown man.
"Observation 87. Mlle. R., a person of excellent judgment, religious, but not a bigot, lived before her marriage at her uncle's house, D., the celebrated physician and a member of the Institute. She was away from her mother, who was attacked by violent illness in the country. One night this young person dreamed that she saw her, pale, disfigured, very near death, and showing deep grief at not having her children with her, one of whom, the curate of a parish in Paris, had emigrated to Spain, the other being in Paris. Soon she heard herself called by her christian name several times; in her dream she saw the persons who were with her mother, thinking she called her little granddaughter, who had the same name, go into the next room for her, when a sign from the sick woman told them it was not she, but her daughter who lived in Paris, whom she wanted to see. Her face showed the grief she felt at the daughter's absence; suddenly her features changed, the paleness of death spread over her face, and she fell back lifeless on her bed.
"The next morning Mlle. R. seemed very sad to D., who begged to know the cause of her grief. She told him all the particulars of the dream which had so greatly distressed her. D., finding her in that frame of mind, pressed her to his heart, acknowledging that the news was only too true, that her mother had just died; he did not enter into further particulars.
"A few months afterwards Mlle. R., profiting by her uncle's absence to put in order his papers, which, like many other savants, he disliked to have touched, found a letter to her uncle relating the circumstances of her mother's death. What was her surprise to read all the particulars of her dream!"