Miss W. writes:—
"7 —— STREET, Dec. 4.
"I am not quite sure whether the incident to which you allude in your note is worthy your attention or not, but I will give you the facts, that you may judge for yourself of its value.
"The burglary, we suppose, took place on the night of the 17th or 18th of August, I being at the time, for the summer, in the town of Lunenburg, Mass.
"Coming down to breakfast on the morning of the 17th, a lady said to me that she had had a strange dream. She thought she went to our house, finding it in the greatest confusion, everything turned upside-down. As she entered one of the sleeping-rooms she saw two boys lying in the bed; but she could not see their faces, for as soon as they saw her they jumped up and ran off. I said, 'I hope that does not mean that we have been visited by burglars.'
"I thought no more about it, till the eleven o'clock mail brought a note from the woman in charge of the house saying that it had been entered,—that everything was in great confusion, many things carried off, and she wished we would come home at once. The policeman who went over the house with her said he had never seen a house more thoroughly ransacked.
"We found that in the upper attic room the bed had evidently been used, and there was, perhaps, more confusion in this room than in any other.
"The lady who had the dream was Mrs. E. J., of Cambridgeport. I was told that she had been suffering for about a year from nervous prostration, and she was evidently in a condition of great nervous excitement.
"I forbore to speak to her of the occurrence, as one of the ladies in the house told me that it had made an unpleasant impression on her mind.
"The whole thing seems rather curious to me, but I do not know that you will find it of any value in your investigations."
A dream presenting similar features is recorded in the Journal of the S.P.R. for June 1890. Mr. William Bass, farm bailiff to Mrs. Palmer, of Turnours Hall, Chigwell, on Good Friday, 1884, "awoke in violent agitation and profuse perspiration" from a dream that something was wrong at the stables. He was at first dissuaded by his wife from paying any attention to the dream, but subsequently, at about 2 A.M., dressed and proceeded to the stables (a third of a mile off) to find that a mare had been stolen. The case has been investigated by Mr. T. Barkworth, of West Hatch, Chigwell, and by Mr. J. B. Surgey, of 22 Holland Street, Kensington. In a dream recorded in Phantasms of the Living (vol. i. p. 369), Miss Busk, of 16 Montagu Street, W., dreamt that in a spot in Kent well known to her she stumbled over "the heads, left protruding, of some ducks buried in the sand, under some firs." The dream was mentioned at breakfast to Miss Busk's sister, Mrs. Pitt Byrne, and an hour later the ladies learnt from their bailiff that some stolen ducks had accidentally been found buried on the spot and in the manner described.
CHAPTER IX.
ON HALLUCINATION IN GENERAL.
Before proceeding, in the chapters which follow, to cite instances of hallucinations which purport to have been telepathically originated, it seems needful to glance briefly at sensory hallucination in general. To most persons, no doubt, the word connotes disease. Their ideas of hallucination are probably derived from vague reports of asylum experience and delirium tremens; or at least from the cases of Goethe's butt, Nicolai, the Berlin bookseller, and the Mrs. A. whose experiences are described in Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, both of whom are known to have been under medical treatment for illness of which the hallucinations were regarded as a symptom. Indeed, until recent years the tendency of even well-instructed opinion has been to regard a sensory hallucination as necessarily implying some physical or mental disorder. This misconception—for it is a misconception—has had some curious consequences. Since it does occasionally happen that a person admittedly sane and healthy reports to have seen the likeness of a human figure in what was apparently empty space, such reports have been by some perforce scouted as unworthy of credence, and by others regarded as necessarily indicating some occult cause—as testifying, in short, to the agency of "ghosts." There was indeed the analogy of dreams to guide us. Few educated persons would regard dreams, on the one hand, as a symptom of ill-health, or on the other as counterparts or revelations of any super-terrestrial world; or, indeed, as anything else than purely subjective mental images. Yet dreams belong to the same order of mental phenomena as hallucinations, and are commonly so classed—such differences as exist being mainly due to the conditions under which the two sets of phenomena respectively occur. In fact, a hallucination is simply a hypertrophied thought—the last member of a series, whose intermediate terms are to be found in the mind's-eye pictures of ordinary life, in the vivid images which some artists can summon at will, and in the Faces in the Dark which many persons see before passing into sleep, with its more familiar and abundant imagery.
Of recent years, however, our knowledge of hallucinations has been largely augmented from two distinct sources. On the one hand, a systematic attempt has been made to study the spontaneous non-recurrent hallucinations occurring amongst normal persons; on the other hand, wider knowledge of hypnotism and the discovery of various processes for inducing hallucinations has afforded facilities for the experimental investigation of their nature, mechanism, and genesis, both in the trance and in waking life. The hallucinations, indeed, of the ordinary hypnotic subject, with which the public has been familiarised by platform demonstrations, are possibly not sensory at all. When a hypnotised lad eats tallow-candle for sponge-cake, drinks ink for champagne, or professes to see a lighted candle at the end of the operator's finger, we may conclude, if the performance is a genuine one, that a false belief has been engendered in his mind; but we have, in most cases, no evidence that this belief includes any sensory element. In many laboratory experiments, however, there can be little question that a complete sensory hallucination is induced, and that what the subject professes to see and hear is as real to him as the furniture or the person of the operator. One or two such cases have been quoted in a previous chapter (Chap. III., p. 68). The nature and reaction of these hypnotic hallucinations have been investigated with much ingenuity by various Continental observers.[93] MM. Binet and Féré, to quote the best-known series of experiments, have found, speaking generally, that the hallucinatory percept behaves under various conditions precisely as if it were a real percept. Thus, if the subject is told to see a picture on a blank card, he will not only see the picture at the time, but he will be able subsequently to pick out the card, recognising it by means of the hallucinatory picture impressed on it, from a number of similar cards. If the card is inverted, he will see the picture upside-down; if a magnifying glass is interposed, he will see the picture enlarged; viewed through a prism, it will appear doubled; it will be reflected in a mirror; and if the hallucinatory image consists of written or printed words, he will see the writing in the mirror inverted. Hallucinatory colours will develop after-images of the complementary colour, precisely as if coloured surfaces were actually present to the eyes of the halluciné; and a mixture of these hallucinatory colours will produce the appropriate third colour. If other proof were needed of the sensory nature of the induced affection, MM. Binet and Féré find it in the observation that with cataleptic subjects who have lost the sensitiveness of the cornea and conjunctiva, this sensitiveness is restored when a visual hallucination is enjoined upon them. M. Pierre Janet, in L'Automatisme Psychologique, has recorded a similar restoration of sensitiveness in a subject's arm by the imposition of a tactile hallucination.