Pictures were of course conveyed as subjective visions, and the Society began very early to collect and classify accounts of visions of all kinds, applying rigid canons of verification.
In 1886 the Society published a collection of "Phantasms of the Living" compiled by Gurney, Myers and Podmore. Seven hundred cases were thought sufficiently verified to be worth including.
This work was severely criticised by Mr. Charles Pearce in the Proceedings of a short-lived American society, and he was there answered by Mr. Gurney.
Gurney died while preparing a work on Phantasms of the Dead. His material was put in shape by Myers, and published in the Proceedings of the Society, Vol. V, pp. 403f. "Phantasms of the Living" is now out of print but much of its material is obtainable in Journal I and the Reports of the Literary Committee in the early volumes of the Proceedings.
Space does not admit of enough citation and discussion from these works to be of value. It may be said in general, however, that with one class of partial exceptions, there is hardly any ghost story that one has ever heard of which does not find its parallel here, confirmed by excellent witnesses and often by considerable supplementary investigation. The partial exceptions are the stories of freezing horror which, the evidence now suggests, would appear to have little, if any, basis in actual experience, but to be mainly the products of imagination—often of deliberate imagination laboring for dramatic effect. The authenticated phenomena are generally of gentle and innocuous character—appearance of dying friends, etc. There are some apparently of troubled souls, but hardly ever of malevolent ones.
The vast majority of the experiences have taken place in bed, and therefore are presumably dreams, and there is much reason to believe that the others come in some sort of a dream state, the whole business probably being associated, as before indicated, with telepathy, and telepathy probably being associated with hypnotism, not always voluntary or conscious.
The experiences are apparently of sight, sound, touch—all the senses. And yet in connection with visions, there have been few changes in objective Nature to account for them.
Much regarding hypnotism was published in the early volumes, but that subject is now so much a part of the knowledge of the medical world, and even the world in general, that we will not enlarge upon it here.