But why did the cow become a calf? That, too, is something to be explained. Says Craig: “Do you remember what I used to tell you about old Mr. Bebb and his calves?” Yes, the husband knows the story of the half-crazy old Welshman, who thirty or forty years ago was the caretaker of the Kimbrough summer home on the Mississippi Sound. Old Mr. Bebb made his hobby the raising of calves by hand, and turning them into parlor pets. He would teach them to use his three fingers as a nursing bottle, and would make fancy embroidered belly-bands for them, and tie them up in these. So to the subconscious mind which was once little Mary Craig Kimbrough of Mississippi, the idea of a calf sewed up like a football is one of the most natural in the world.
Since my wife and I have no secrets from each other, it does not trouble me that she is able to see what I am doing. While I am away from home, she will “concentrate” upon me, and immediately afterwards write out what she “sees.” On one occasion she described to me a little red book which I had got in the mail at the office. By way of establishing just what kind of book she had “seen,” she had gone to my bookcase and picked out a French dictionary—and it happened that I had just received the Italian dictionary of that same series, uniform in binding. On another occasion, while making a study of dream-material, she wrote out a dream about being lost in long and involved concrete corridors—while I was trying to find my way through the locker-rooms of a Y. M. C. A. basement, running into one blind passage after another, and being much annoyed by doors that wouldn’t open.
Dreams, you understand, are products of subconscious activity, and to watch them is one method of proving telepathy. By practice Craig has learned to lie passive, immediately after awakening, and trace back a long train of dreams. Here is one of the results, a story worth telling in detail—save that I fear you will refuse to believe it after it is told.
On the afternoon of January 30, 1928, I was playing tennis on the courts of the Virginia Hotel, in Long Beach, California, and my wife was taking a nap. She did not know that I was playing tennis, and has no knowledge about the places where I play. She takes no interest in the game, regarding it as a foolish business which will some day cause her husband to drop dead of heart failure—and she declines to be present on the occasion. When I entered the house, she said: “I woke up with a long involved dream, and it seemed so absurd I didn’t want to write it out, but I did so.” Here are the opening sentences verbatim:
“Dreamed I was on a pier, watching a new kind of small, one or two seated sport-boat, a little water car into which a woman got and was shot by machinery from the pier out to the water, where she skidded around a minute or two and was drawn back to the pier. With us on the pier were my sister and child, and two young men in white with white caps. These appeared to be in charge of this new sport-boat. This boat is not really a boat. It is a sort of miniature car. I’ve never seen anything like it. Short, so that only one or two people could sit in it. An amusement thing, belonging to the pier. The two young men were intensely interested, and stood close together watching it out on the water,” etc., etc.
Understand that this dream was not supposed to have anything to do with me. It was before Craig had come to realize the state of rapport with me; she had not been thinking about me, and when she told me about this dream, she had no thought that any part of it had come from my mind. But here is what I told her about my afternoon:
The Virginia Hotel courts are close to what is called “The Pike,” and there is an amusement pier just across the way, and on it a so-called “Ferris wheel,” with little cars exactly like the description, which go up into the air with people in them. That afternoon it happened that the tennis courts were crowded, so my partner and I waited out a set or two. We sat on a bench, in white tennis suits and hats, and watched this wheel, and the cars which went up in the air, and at a certain point took a slide on long rods, which made them “skid around,” and caused the women in them to scream with excitement. Underneath the pier was the ocean, plainly visible along with the little cars.
(Footnote, 1962: The hotel and the Pike no longer exist, so do not waste your time trying to verify all this.)
I should also mention the case of our friend, Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz, with whom there is a rapport which my wife does not tell her about. My wife will say to me, “Mrs. Gartz is going to phone,” and in a minute or two the phone will ring. She will say, “Mrs. Gartz is coming. She wants me to go to Los Angeles with her.” Of course, a good deal of guessing might be possible, in the case of two intimate friends. But consider such guessing as this: My wife had a dream of an earthquake and wrote it down. Soon thereafter occurred this conversation with Mrs. Gartz. I heard it, and my wife recorded it immediately afterwards, and I quote her written record:
“Mrs. Gartz dreamed of earthquake. ‘Wasn’t it queer that I dreamed of swaying slowly from side to side.’”