In all ages of the world a belief in the prophetic character of certain dreams has prevailed. Numerous examples are recorded in which a warning intimation of approaching disaster has been thus received. Thus the holy evangelist, St. Matthew, relates that Joseph, the husband of Mary, was guided by dreams to escape with his family from the murderous designs of Herod and of his son Archelaus. The literature of the middle ages is filled with similar narratives. Coming down to recent times, it is not difficult to gather numerous examples of dreams which have been excited by presentiments of good or evil. A lady who was about to embark upon the ill-fated steamer Arctic, dreamed so vividly of shipwreck that she refused to take passage, and thus escaped the frightful disaster which overwhelmed the ship and its numerous passengers. Max Simon[64] relates the case of a lady who, in spite of a similar warning, embarked upon a steamship and lost her life, through the explosion of the boiler during the voyage. On another occasion[65] a noble lady dreamed that a wing of the palace in which her children were sleeping was about to fall down. Starting up, she called her waiting maids, and insisted that they should bring the children to her chamber. The women endeavored to calm her agitation, quoting an old proverb to the effect that “dreams go by contraries.” As she persisted in her commands, they feigned obedience, but soon returned to say that the young princes were sleeping too quietly to be removed. The princess would not be thus composed; and at last the servants reluctantly brought the little boys from their room. They had scarcely reached their mother’s apartments, when the disaster of which she had dreamed was realized, and the bedroom from which they had just been carried, was crushed into a mass of ruins.
The ancient explanation of such events consisted in a reference to the Deity, who was supposed to address his favorites through the medium of dreams. The modern skeptical explanation views all such revelations as mere accidents. Among the myriads of dreamers, say the “five-sense philosophers,” the infinite variety of combinations which disturb the brain during sleep, cannot fail to produce occasionally such coincidences. When these are of a striking character, the seemingly prophetic vision is remembered, but the cases of discrepancies between vision and result are not recorded, and are soon forgotten. This opinion may very probably be correct in the vast majority of instances; but, if so, we are not in a position to assert any scientific demonstration of the fact. There is, moreover, so far as the ancient religious view is concerned, a certain transcendental sense in which it is true that God may guide his creatures through the agency of dreams, as well as in a thousand other different ways; but this metaphysical process we can no more comprehend than we can understand or explain the interaction of mind and matter in the brain. The psycho-physiologist must content himself, at present, with the attempt to show that it may not be incompatible with natural law for coming events to cast their shadows before them through the forms of a dream. The following observations lend color to such a possibility.
The extraordinary susceptibility of the brain during certain conditions of sleep has already been noted as a cause for the superior vividness of coloring and intensity of action which sometimes characterizes our dreams. In this respect a slightly morbid condition of the brain, comparable to the effects of hasheesh, probably exists. In such cases the brain may be disturbed to a degree sufficient for the awakening of consciousness by causes that would ordinarily be powerless to reveal themselves. Recording his experience of an earthquake at Lesina, in the night of Sept. 8, 1884, Buschick states, in the Journal of the Austrian Meteorological Society, that a few seconds before the shock he was awakened with a feeling of strange discomfort and apprehension. Once before, on a similar occasion, he had been in like manner aroused from sleep just before the commencement of an earthquake, probably by a feeble and ordinarily imperceptible agitation of the soil. At a time when I was for many months severely overtasked, I always woke up in the night whenever about to receive a call to a patient. Before the sound of footsteps became audible on the sidewalk, I would wake. Presently some one would be heard, approaching the house, and then the doorbell would ring. So often was this experience repeated, that I learned to expect a summons whenever awakened during the night. Gradually, however, as my health improved with rest, this morbid excitability disappeared, and has never been renewed. It seems probable that in this example the sensitiveness of the brain during sleep was so great that audible impressions were received with vigor sufficient to awake consciousness before they were sufficiently strong to arrest the attention when actually awake. The extreme sensibility of the brain, under certain conditions, to impressions from a distance, is further illustrated by the experience of persons laboring under diseases which produce serious departures from a healthy cerebral circulation. Thus, one of my patients, while suffering with cerebral hyperæmia, could hear children talking half a mile away, at a distance where no one else could hear them. This susceptibility is doubtless the foundation of many well authenticated cases of presentiment. Another of my patients, a lady of remarkably sensitive nervous organization, though otherwise in apparently good health, was one evening lying alone upon her bed. Suddenly, she became greatly agitated with the conviction that something had happened to her husband, who had not yet returned from his place of business. He presently, however, came quietly into the house, and greeted his wife as usual. She exclaimed at once, “What has happened to you, my dear?” “Nothing,” he replied. “Yes,” she said, “something has happened, just now; I felt that you were in trouble.” “Oh, yes,” answered he, after a moment’s reflection, “as I was passing by the park, on my way home, two men tried to stop my horse, but I whipped up, and got away from them without any trouble.”
On another occasion the same patient was one day suddenly oppressed by a conviction that something had happened to her mother and sister, who were driving together at some distance from home. After a short time they actually returned in a sorry plight, without their carriage. The horse had run away, upsetting them upon the road.
In all these cases it is worthy of remark that there was present an unusual degree of cerebral erethism. Solicitude, weariness, anxiety, inordinate irritability of the brain. It is possible that under such conditions one may hear premonitory sounds, may in some sort feel distant agitations which our healthy organs are usually incapable of apprehending. When such a brain during sleep is unoccupied with the ordinary objects of sensation, feeble impulses, which usually remain unnoticed, may sometimes suffice to arrest the attention. We may thus explain the possibility of impressions derived from distant events passing into the consciousness of a dreamer, and arousing hallucinations of which the immediate cerebral mechanism is the same as that of the ordinary hypnagogic hallucination. Thus, the Rev. Canon Warburton relates the following experience[66]:
“Somewhere about the year 1848 I went up from Oxford to stay a day or two with my brother.... When I got to his chambers I found a note on the table apologising for his absence, and saying that he had gone to a dance somewhere in the West End, and intended to be home soon after one o’clock. Instead of going to bed, I dozed in an arm-chair, but started up wide awake exactly at one, ejaculating, ‘By Jove, he’s down!’ and seeing him come out of a drawing-room into a brightly illuminated landing, catching his foot in the edge of the top stair, and falling headlong, just saving himself by his elbows and hands. (The house was one which I had never seen, nor did I know where it was.) Thinking very little of the matter, I fell a-doze again for half an hour, and was awakened by my brother suddenly coming in and saying, ‘Oh, there you are! I have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck as I ever had in my life. Coming out of the ball-room, I caught my foot, and tumbled full length down the stairs.’”
An incident of this character might very properly be ranked as a mere coincidence, were it not for the fact that it is one only of a considerable number of well attested acts of vision connected either with the hypnagogic state or with the act of dreaming itself. The comparative rarity of such events lends them a marvelous aspect; yet there is really nothing about them any more wonderful or preternatural than the demonstrated possibility of telegraphic signaling across the sea without the intervention of an electric wire.[67] Under ordinary circumstances a metallic conductor must serve as the avenue of communication between distant stations; but if a sufficiently sensitive piece of apparatus be placed in contact with the water on either side of an arm of the sea, communications may be transmitted from one to the other by a diffusion of impulses through the entire body of water.
In like manner we ordinarily see and hear and feel as a consequence of cerebral excitement occasioned by specific impressions concentrated through the organs of sight and hearing and touch. But it is quite reasonable to believe in the possible existence of a brain so delicately organized as to be capable of reacting to impressions which are too diffuse and too feeble to arouse the ordinary apparatus of sensation. With such a brain it might be possible to experience perception without eye-sight. Evidence furnished by the facts of somnambulism and hypnotism indicates that the receptivity of the brain may become temporarily exalted to a degree which warrants the inference that clairvoyance itself may be thus brought within the capacity of certain peculiarly sensitive organizations. The same extraordinary receptivity occasionally seems to attend the act of dreaming. For example, one of my acquaintances, a lady of a highly wrought nervous temperament, the wife of a distinguished physician in a neighboring State, dreamed one night that a favorite cousin, a beautiful little girl, who lived at a distance of twelve or fifteen miles, was very dangerously ill. She saw the child lying on its mother’s lap, evidently at the point of death, when some one brought a tub of warm water and proceeded to give the patient a bath. This revived the little one so that she recovered. The dream made a very considerable impression upon my friend, by reason of its peculiar character, and because dreaming was for her a very unusual experience. Next morning she rose as usual, but during the forenoon she was startled by the receipt of a message requesting her to come at once to the house of her uncle, as his little daughter had been taken suddenly ill with the croup, and had expired during the preceding night. Hastening to the bereaved household, she found her aunt sitting with the dead child on her lap, precisely as she had appeared in the dream. The little girl had been suddenly attacked during the night, and, as she lay gasping in her mother’s arms, some one advised a warm bath, and brought a tub of water into the room for that purpose. Unfortunately, just as they were hopefully preparing to dip the child into the water, she had ceased to breathe.
The lack of conformity between the conclusion of this dream and the actual fact reminds one of the blurring of the images that are transferred from one brain to another in the acts of telepathy recently investigated by the Society for Psychical Research. Something similar is frequently observed in connection with the phenomena of hypnotism. The hypnotised subject does not always perceive clearly or wholly the sensation that is suggested by the agent who operates upon his brain.
For another example of apparently clairvoyant dreaming, I am indebted to a friend, a well-known gentleman of unimpeachable veracity, who, when a young man in the army, during the war of the great rebellion, was taken very ill, and was sent home to New England from one of the most remote outposts of the campaign. No one of his family had the slightest information or suspicion of his illness, until the night before his arrival, when his father dreamed that the absent son was sick, and would arrive the next day, at an hour unusual for travelers coming from the South. So vivid was this dream, and so powerful was its influence upon the mind of the dreamer, that he went at the specified hour to the railway station, with a carriage full of blankets and pillows, to receive his son. When the train arrived, and the invalid actually appeared, the mutual astonishment of father and son can better be imagined than described.