“Very well, my lass,” said the farmer, “come, and I’ll show you what he had to give you.” He led the way, and revealed to the horrified girl the long, deep, narrow hole and sharp ax which had awaited her. Naturally, she did not any longer pursue her lover; and here is a dream which even Mr. Proctor will admit not to have been purposeless. Indeed, the “machinery” of the drowning cow made the vision appeal directly to the bucolic mind.
Of the same prophetic character is the following well-authenticated dream:
Mrs. Jacob Condon, living a few miles from Reed, Pa., dreamed a few nights ago that her year-old baby was burned to death, and that she sent word of the casualty to her husband, who was working at a distance from home, by James Portlewaith, a neighbor. The next morning she told her husband of her dream, and admitted that it made her despondent. He laughed at her fears, and went away to his work. Late in the forenoon, Mrs. Condon left her kitchen to go to the wood-shed, a few steps away. While she was there she heard her baby screaming. She ran into the house and found the child lying in front of an open grate, wrapped in flames. She threw an old coat about the child, and smothered the flames, but it was so badly burned that it died in a few minutes. Mrs. Condon went to the door to call for assistance. As she reached the door, James Portlewaith was passing the gate. She sent him to her husband with the dreadful news, thus fulfilling her terrible dream to the letter.
Mrs. Howitt, whose veracity no one can dispute, gives the following experience in the Psychological Review, London, which may be taken as an illustration of thought transference, or as the interposition of a supreme intelligence:
“I dreamed that I received a letter from my eldest son. In my dream I eagerly broke open the seal, and saw a closely-written sheet of paper, but my eye caught only these words in the middle of the first page, written larger than the rest and underlined, ‘My father is very ill.’ The utmost distress seized me, and I suddenly awoke, to find it only a dream; yet the painful impression of reality was so vivid, that it was long before I could compose myself. The first thing I did the following morning was to commence a letter to my husband, relating this distressing dream. Six days afterwards, on the 18th, an Australian mail came in and brought me a letter, the only letter I received by that mail, and not from any of my own family, but from a gentleman in Australia with whom we were acquainted. This letter was addressed on the outside, ‘Immediate,’ and with a trembling hand I opened it; and true enough, the first words I saw—and these written larger than the rest, in the middle of the paper, and underlined, were: ‘Mr. Howitt is very ill.’ The context of these terrible words was, however, ‘If you hear that Mr. Howitt is very ill, let this assure you that he is better;’ but the only emphatic words which I saw in my dream, and these, nevertheless, slightly varying, as, from some cause or other, all such mental impressions, spirit revelations, or occult, dark sayings generally do vary from the truth or type which they seem to reflect.”
Stainton Moses, M. D., who has given life-long attention to psychic research, remarks on the apparent discrepancy between the words of the dream, and the letter as follows:
“It may be permitted to the writer to suggest, that through a fuller acquaintance with, and deeper observation of, the phenomena of ‘spirit revelation, occult, dark sayings’, etc., the truth has forced itself upon various philosophic minds, that in obedience to a primal law of spirit’s intercourse with spirit—it is always the essence or spirit of an idea or fact which is sought to be conveyed to the mind, and not the mere literal clothing of that idea or fact. This essence or spirit of the idea is the grain of true wheat alone needed; the form is simply the husk that clothes it for a temporary purpose, and must of necessity fall away from it as a dead thing. ‘In this material, matter-of-fact age, literal truth,’ says the Rev. James Smith, ‘the lowest of all truths in one sense, is generally regarded as the highest. But they are superficial thinkers who dabble only in literal truth or physical truth.’ This is a knowledge of Law Spiritual, without which progress is impossible for the student of psychology.”
The Idea, not Words, Conveyed.—If the idea was sent through the psychic-ether, as a wave of thought, it would translate itself into language, and the language of the receiving mind would be the one into which it would be translated. It would pass through space as the essence of thought, and the sensitive recipient would clothe it with the garments of words.
Wm. Howitt, on his visit to Australia, had a dream which he regarded as having great importance as a fact in Mental Science. He says:
“Some weeks ago, while yet at sea, I had a dream of being at my brother’s at Melbourne, and found his house on a hill at the further end of the town, next to the open forest. The garden sloped a little way down the hill to some brick buildings below; and there were greenhouses on the right hand by the wall as you looked down the hill from the house. As I looked out the windows in my dream, I saw a wood of dusky-foliaged trees, having a segregated appearance in their heads; that is, their heads did not make that dense mass like our woods. ‘There!’ said I, addressing some one in my dream, ‘I see your native forest of Eucalyptus!’ This dream I told to my sons, and to two of our fellow-passengers, at the time, and on landing, as we walked over the meadows, long before we reached the town, I saw this very wood. ‘There!’ I exclaimed, ‘is the very wood of my dream. We shall see my brother’s house there.’ And so we did. It stood exactly as I saw it, only looking newer; but there, over the wall of the garden, is the wood exactly as I saw it and now see it, as I sit at the dining-room window writing. When I look upon this scene I seem to look into my dream.”