Here it is perhaps permissible to conjecture that some common experience of their waking life might have suggested to both sisters the idea of a primeval skeleton with a snout. But it is remarkable, if such is the true explanation, that the common idea was elaborated into a dream by the two percipients almost simultaneously. It must be admitted, however, that such dreams, which have hitherto been reported only as occurring between persons whose lives are spent for the most part in the same surroundings, have little value as evidence. It is only those who believe, on evidence derived from other sources, in the reality of telepathy, who will be inclined to regard such cases as possibly due to its action, rather than to the spontaneous association of ideas in minds sharing the same experiences and moving to some extent in similar grooves.
Dreams coinciding with external events.
In the cases which follow the coincidence is of a more definite kind, and the question is now no longer of the correspondence of thought in closely associated minds, but of the correspondence of thought with an outward event—with something done or suffered by the person whose mind apparently affects that of the dreamer.
Transference of Sensation in Dreams.
The following case, quoted from the Proc. of the Am. S.P.R. (pp. 226, 227), offers a curious parallel to some of the cases recorded at the beginning of Chapter II. The narrator is a lady of Boston, whose good faith is vouched for by Professor Royce. She wrote from Hamburg on the 23rd of June 1887 to her sister, who was at that time in Boston, U.S.A. The following is an extract from this letter:—
No. 53.
"I very nearly wrote from the Hague to say that I should be very thankful when we had a letter from you of the 18th of June saying that you were well and happy.... In the night of the 17th I had what I suppose to be a nightmare, but it all seemed to belong to you ... and to be a horrid pain in your head, as if it were being forcibly jammed into an iron casque, or some such pleasant instrument of torture. The queer part of it was my own dissociation from the pain, and conviction that it was yours. I suppose it was some slight painful sensation magnified into something quite severe by a half-asleep condition. It will be a fine example of what the Society for Psychical Research ought to be well supplied with—an Ahnung which came to nothing."
As a matter of fact the lady in Boston to whom this letter was addressed is shown, on the evidence of a dentist's bill, to have spent on the 17th June an hour and three-quarters in the operating chair, while a painful tooth was being stopped. The discomfort consequent on the operation, as was learnt from the patient herself, "continued as a dull pain for some hours, in such wise that during the afternoon of the 17th June the patient could not forget the difficulty at all. She slept, however, as usual at night. The nightmare in Europe followed the operation in Boston by a good many hours, but the pain of the tooth returned daily for some three weeks." As the letter was written from Europe six days after the nightmare there was of course no possibility of any communication having passed in the interval except by telegram.
In the next case also the coincidence was of a trivial nature, but appears to have been exact in point of time. The narrative is quoted here because the impression, though not described beforehand, was of a quite unusual kind, being in part, if not altogether, a waking experience. It is doubtful, indeed, whether it should be classed as a dream, and not rather as a "borderland" hallucination.