Telepathy and the Subliminal Self

by R. Osgood Mason

“When, in my narration, I said he was riding with another officer and mounted soldiers behind them, she exclaimed ‘My dear, that shows you it is only a dream, for your brother is in an infantry, not a cavalry, regiment.’

“Nothing, however, shook my feeling that I had seen a reality; and she was so much struck by my persistence that she privately made notes of the dates and of the incidents, even to the minutest details of my dream, and then for a few days the matter dropped, but I felt the truth was coming nearer and nearer to all. In a short time the news came in the papers:—‘Shot down on the morning of the 25th, when on his way to Lucknow.’ A few days later came one of his missing letters, telling how his own regiment had mutinied, and that he had been transferred to a command in the 12th Irregular Cavalry, bound to join Havelock’s force in the relief of Lucknow.

“Some eight years after, the officer who was riding by him when he fell, Captain or Major Grant, visited us and when, in compliance with my aunt’s request, he detailed the incidents of that sad hour, his narration tallied (even to the description of buildings on their left) with the notes she had taken the morning of my dream. I should also add that we heard my brother had made the alteration in his beard and whiskers, just about the time that I had spoken of him as wearing them differently.”

“L. A. W.”

The next case which I will present is from Dr. A. K. Young, F. R. C. S. I., of the Terrace, Monaghan, Ireland.

One Monday night, in December, 1836, Dr. Young had the following dream, or, as he would prefer to call it, revelation. He found himself suddenly at the gate of Major N. M.’s avenue, many miles from his home. Close to him was a group of persons, one of them a woman with a basket on her arm, the rest men, four of whom were tenants of his own, while the others were unknown to him. Some of the strangers seemed to be murderously assaulting H. W., one of his tenants, and he interfered. He goes on to say:

“I struck violently at the man on my left and then with greater violence at the man’s face to my right. Finding to my surprise that I did not knock him down either, I struck again and again with all the violence of a man frenzied at the sight of my poor friend’s murder. To my great amazement I saw that my arms, although visible to my eye, were without substance; and the bodies of the men I struck at and my own came close together after each blow through the shadowy arms I struck with. My blows were delivered with more extreme violence than I ever before exerted; but I became painfully convinced of my incompetency. I have no consciousness of what happened after this feeling of unsubstantiality came upon me.”

Next morning, Dr. Young experienced the stiffness and soreness of violent bodily exercise and was informed by his wife that in the course of the night he had much alarmed her by striking out again and again with his arms in a terrific manner, “as if fighting for his life.” He in turn informed her of his dream and begged her to remember the names of the actors in it who were known to him.

On the morning of the following day, Wednesday, he received a letter from his agent, who resided in the town close to the scene of his dream, informing him that his tenant, H. W., had been found on Tuesday morning at Major N. M.’s gate speechless and apparently dying from a fracture of the skull, and that there was no trace of the murderers. That night Dr. Young started for the town and arrived there on Thursday morning. On his way to a meeting of the magistrates he met the senior magistrate of that part of the country and requested him to give orders for the arrest of the three men whom, besides H. W., he had recognized in his dream, and to have them examined separately. This was done. The three men gave identical accounts of the occurrence, and all named the woman who was with them. She was then arrested and gave precisely similar testimony.

They said that between eleven and twelve on Monday night they had been walking homeward, all together along the road, when they were overtaken by three strangers, two of whom savagely assaulted H. W., while the other prevented his friends from interfering. The man H. W. did not die, and no clue was ever found to the assassins.