It will be seen that Miss A—— fixes the date of her first hallucination on Tuesday, whereas Mr. Sparks and Mr. Cleave speak of it as Friday. Mr. Gurney, in conversation with the experimenters, was unable to fix the actual date with any certainty, but there can be little doubt that if Tuesday was the day, it fell within the five days on which Mr. Cleave attempted to see Miss A——. Of the second coincidence there can be no doubt.
The next case is recorded by Mr. F. W. H. Myers (Journal S.P.R., March 1891), who writes:—
No. 64.
"In 1888 a gentleman, whom I will call Mr. A., who has occupied a high public position in India, and whom I have known a long time, informed me verbally that he had had a remarkable experience. He awoke one morning, in India, very early, and in the dawning light saw a lady, whom I will call Mrs. B., standing at the foot of his bed. At the same time he received an impression that she needed him. This was his sole experience of a hallucination; and it so much impressed him that he wrote to the lady, who was in England at the time, and mentioned the circumstance. He afterwards heard from her that she had been in a trance-condition at the time, and had endeavoured to appear to him by way of an experiment.
"Mr. A. did not give me the lady's name, supposing that she did not desire the incident to be spoken of; nor did he find an opportunity of himself inquiring as to her willingness to mention the matter."
Subsequently, on July 13th, 1890, the agent, Mrs. B., wrote of her own accord to Mr. Myers. Mrs. B. began by stating that she had submitted herself to be experimented upon by a lady friend, with the view of acquiring clairvoyant faculties. She then described how in the course of one experiment in 1886 she lost consciousness of outward things, and saw the figure of a tall woman, whom she recognised as a friend of her mother's, standing by her. Then she goes on:—
"I find myself seriously debating within myself what I should do to prove to myself, and for my own satisfaction, if I am indeed the victim of hallucination or not. I decided in a flash on a man whom I knew to be possessed of the most work-a-day world common-sense; his views and mine regarding most things were at the antipodes, very unreceptive, who would be entirely out of sympathy with me in my present experiment and experiences, at which I knew he would only laugh, while regarding me as a simple tool in tricky hands. Such a man was, I decided, the most satisfactory for my trial. The grey lady here impressed me with a desire to will; in her anxiety she appeared to move towards me. I felt her will one with mine, and I willed with a concentrated strength of mind and body, which finally prostrated me, thus: I will that [Mr. A.] may feel I am near him and want his help; and that, without any suggestion from me, he write to tell me I have influenced him to-night.
"The grey lady disappeared. I was seated in the chair, weary, but feeling naturally, and back in common-place life. We put down the date and the appearance of the grey lady, and I spoke to none of what had happened. Some weeks passed, when I received a letter from [Mr. A.], asking how had I been employed on a certain July evening at such and such an hour, mentioning to what hour it would answer in London—day, date, and hour were those on which I had made my proof trial—saying that he was asleep, and had dreamed something he would tell me, but that he awoke from the dream feeling I wanted something of him, and asking me to let him know if at the time he so carefully mentioned I had been doing anything which had any reference to him. I then, and then only, told him what I have here related."
Unfortunately Mr. A., on being again appealed to, refused to write an account of his own experience, on the ground that his memory for details might by lapse of time have become untrustworthy. The case is therefore defective, not merely by the length of time which passed between the incident and the agent's record of it, but by the absence of any direct testimony from the percipient. It will be seen that Mrs. B. writes of Mr. A.'s impression as a dream. It seems clear, however, that Mr. A. did not himself regard his experience as a dream.
An interesting account is given by Miss Edith Maughan (Journal S.P.R.) of a similar experiment made by her in the summer of 1888. She was reading in bed when the idea occurred to her of "willing" to appear to her friend, Miss Ethel Thompson, who occupied the adjoining room. After concentrating her attention strongly for a few minutes she "felt dizzy and only half-conscious." On recovering full consciousness she heard Miss Thompson's voice speaking in the next room. The time was about 2 A.M. As a matter of fact, Miss Thompson, who was fully awake, was disturbed between 2 and 3 A.M. by seeing at the bedside the figure of Miss Maughan, which disappeared instantly on a light being struck. It is not perhaps possible under the circumstances, in view of Miss Maughan's own statement that she was only semi-conscious during part of the experiment, absolutely to exclude the hypothesis that the figure seen was that of Miss Maughan in some state analogous to somnambulism, and the case is not therefore given in full; but it is important to note that both ladies—and we have reason to know that they are good observers—are convinced that the figure seen was not that of Miss Maughan in the flesh, and the rapidity of the disappearance is a further argument against such a supposition.
In the cases so far dealt with the agent, when his state is recorded, was asleep or entranced at the time of the experiment, whilst the percipient appears as a rule to have been awake. In the cases which follow the agent was awake, but the percipient, in two of the cases—if not also in the third—seems to have seen the hallucinatory figure in the borderland state on awaking from sleep. In two of the cases the agent, no doubt intentionally, chose a time when he had reason to believe that the percipient would be asleep; in the third case, whilst the experiments at night failed, success was obtained when the percipient had fallen asleep unexpectedly in the daytime. In view of the absence of any well-attested cases in which both agent and percipient are shown to have been fully awake immediately before and at the time of the experiment,—in case 62 (Wesermann) the state of the agent, and in case 66 (Wiltse) that of the percipient, is not clearly shown,—it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the condition of sleep or trance in one or both parties to the experiment is favourable to transference of this kind. That sleep, or rather the borderland which lies on either side of sleep, is peculiarly favourable to the production in the percipient, not only of hallucinations in general, but of telepathic hallucinations in particular, has already been shown. But the instances cited in the present chapter would seem to indicate that in the agent also sleep and trance (or possibly a trance self-induced in sleep or in waking) may facilitate such transmissions.