"In September 1881 I had another curious dream, so vivid that I seemed to see it.
"My two boys of eighteen and sixteen were staying in the Black Forest, under the care of a Dr. Fresenius. I must say here that I always supposed the boys would go everywhere together, and I never should have supposed that in that lonely country, so new to them, they would be out after dark. My husband and I were staying at St. Leonards, and one Saturday night I woke at about 12 o'clock (rather before, as I heard it strike) having just seen vividly a dark night on a mountain, and my eldest boy lying on his back at the bottom of some steep place, his eyes wide open, and saying, 'Good-bye, mother and father, I shall never see you again.' I woke with a feeling of anxiety, and the next morning when I told it to my husband, though we both agreed it was absurd to be anxious, yet he would write and tell the boys we hoped they would never go out alone after dark. To my surprise my eldest boy, to whom I wrote the dream, wrote back expressing his great astonishment, for on that Saturday night he was coming home over the mountains, past 11 o'clock; it was pitch dark, and he slipped and fell down some 12 feet or so, and landed on his back, looking up to the sky. However, he was not much hurt, and soon picked himself up and got home all right. He did not say what thoughts passed through his mind as he fell."
In answer to inquiries, Mrs. Freese adds:—
"Before my son wrote about his fall in the Black Forest, I related my dream to my husband, and as he seemed a little moved by it, I wrote an account of it to my boy, saying his father did not wish them to be out after dark alone. I had not told my boy when it was, deeming that immaterial, but when in his letter, received days after, he said, 'Was it Saturday night, because then so-and-so?' I remembered what I should not otherwise have noted, that it was Saturday night; for on the Sunday morning my husband, being much worried about some business matter, elected to spend the morning with me in the fields instead of going to church, and as much to divert his mind as anything I related to him my dream of the night before."
Mrs. Freese sent us the letter from her son, which contained the following passage:—
"With regard to your dream: did you dream it on September 3rd? if so it was on that night, coming home rather late, that I fell down a precipice of 8 feet, or perhaps more, in the dark, and might have broken my neck, but didn't. However, I don't think you will find me walking about after dark more than I can help, as the roads are very dark, and the fogs in the village awful.
"FRED. E. FREESE."[September 3rd, 1881, was a Saturday.]
Mr. Freese wrote on March 7th, 1884, to confirm his wife's account of the dream.
An account by Dr. Gibotteau, given in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, Nov.-Dec. 1892, deserves consideration in this connection. It is the record of a series of unusually successful experiments in the transfer of visual images. But the success obtained was apparently due to a condition of spontaneous clairvoyant perceptivity on the part of the subject. The percipient, who was throughout in a state not clearly distinguishable from that of normal wakefulness, was a head-nurse at the hospital to which Dr. Gibotteau was attached. The occurrence took place in 1888. Madame R. has now remarried and Dr. Gibotteau has lost sight of her, so that her testimony cannot be obtained, and unfortunately Dr. Gibotteau appears not to have committed the incident to writing until 1892. The account therefore represents merely the general impression left after the lapse of some years upon the memory of a trained observer by a very unusual and striking experience. Briefly, Dr. Gibotteau reports that he succeeded in inducing in Madame R., by the mere silent will, an immense number of striking hallucinatory, or rather semi-hallucinatory mental pictures. The ideas thus transferred included transformations and imaginary movements of objects actually present in the room; the appearance of human figures and animals, a serpent, a rabbit, a dog, horses, a bear rampant; and the disappearance of Dr. Gibotteau himself, leaving behind him an empty arm-chair. The séance lasted for nearly three hours, with very few failures of any kind, and left the narrator much exhausted.[149]
The experience, as described, it will be seen, was of an almost unprecedented kind. It is by no means clear that under a natural classification either this or others of the somewhat heterogeneous phenomena described in the present and preceding chapters would be grouped under the same genus, or that any of them are rightly called telepathic. They are provisionally ascribed to telepathy, in the sense already explained (p. 326, Chapter XIV.), because if we accept the facts at all, that appears to be the cheapest solution. The writer is not committed to telepathy as the true explanation; he has adopted it provisionally, as an alternative to some hypothetical faculty of direct intuition beyond the range of sense. If to any reader who accepts the writer's estimate of the alleged facts as beyond chance or misrepresentation, the hypothesis of telepathy appears in such cases to be strained, it may be replied that when the choice of explanation seems to lie between telepathy and some faculty even more dubious and more remote from ordinary analogies, it is right that the hypothesis of telepathy should be strained—if necessary, to the breaking-point—before we invoke a stage-deity to cut the knot.