In these prolonged experimental cases there is thus time enough to allow of the clairvoyante's traversing certain places, such as empty rooms, factories, and the like, whither no assignable link from any living person could draw her. The evidence to prove telæsthesia, unmixed with telepathy, has thus generally come incidentally in the course of some experiment mainly telepathic in character.
These long clairvoyant wanderings are more nearly paralleled by dreams than by waking hallucinations.
In a case which I will here quote a physician is impressed, probably in dream, with a picture of a special place in a street, where something is happening, which, though in itself unemotional—merely that a man is standing and talking in the street—is of moment to the physician, who wants to get unobtrusively into the man's house.
From Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 267. The case is there described as coming "from a Fellow of the College of Physicians, who fears professional injury if he were 'supposed to defend opinions at variance with general scientific belief,' and does not therefore allow his name to appear."
May 20th, 1884.
Twenty years ago [abroad] I had a patient, wife of a parson. She had a peculiar kind of delirium which did not belong to her disease, and perplexed me. The house in which she lived was closed at midnight, that is—the outer door had no bell. One night I saw her at nine. When I came home I said to my wife, "I don't understand that case; I wish I could get into the house late." We went to bed rather early. At about one o'clock I got up. She said, "What are you about? are you not well?" I said, "Perfectly so." "Then why get up?" "Because I can get into that house." "How, if it is shut up?" "I see the proprietor standing under the lamp-post this side of the bridge, with another man." "You have been dreaming." "No, I have been wide awake; but dreaming or waking, I mean to try." I started with the firm conviction that I should find the individual in question. Sure enough there he was under the lamp-post, talking to a friend. I asked him if he was going home. (I knew him very well.) He said he was, so I told him I was going to see a patient, and would accompany him. I was positively ashamed to explain matters; it seemed so absurd that I knew he would not believe me. On arriving at the house I said, "Now I am here, I will drop in and see my patient." On entering the room I found the maid giving her a tumbler of strong grog. The case was clear; it was as I suspected—delirium from drink. The next day I delicately spoke to the husband about it. He denied it, and in the afternoon I received a note requesting me not to repeat the visits. Three weeks ago I was recounting the story and mentioned the name. A lady present said: "That is the name of the clergyman in my parish, at B., and his wife is in a lunatic asylum from drink!"
In conversation with Gurney, the narrator explained that the vision—though giving an impression of externality and seen, as he believes, with open eyes—was not definably located in space. He had never encountered the proprietor in the spot where he saw him, and it was not a likely thing that he should be standing talking in the streets at so late an hour.
In this case we cannot consider either the drunken patient or the indifferent proprietor as in any sense the agent. Somehow or other the physician's own persistent wish to get some such opportunity induced a collaboration of his subliminal with his supraliminal self, akin to the inspirations of genius. Genius, however, operates within ordinary sensory limits; while in this physician's case the subliminal self exercised its farthest-reaching supernormal powers.
With this again may be compared a case in Phantasms of the Living (vol. ii. p. 368), where a dreamer seems to himself to be present in the Thames Tunnel during a fatal accident, which did in fact occur during that night. Here again the drowned workman—who was quite unknown to the distant dreamer—can hardly be called an agent; yet it may have been the excitement surrounding his death which attracted the dreamer's spirit to that scene, as a conflagration might attract a waking night-wanderer.
There are, on the other hand, a good many cases where a scene thus discerned in a flash is one of special interest to the percipient, although no one in the scene may have actually wished to transfer it to him.