"I produced a dog's collar. After some handling of it [by the medium] the 'Doctor' recognized it as belonging to a dog which I had once owned. I asked 'If there were dogs where he was?' 'Thousands of them!' and he said he would try to attract the attention of my dog with this collar. In the midst of our conversation he suddenly exclaimed, 'There! I think he knows you are here, for I see [him] coming from away off!' He then described my collie perfectly, and said, 'You call him, Reach,' and I gave my whistle by which I used to call him. 'Here he comes! Oh, how he jumps! There he is now, jumping upon and around you. So glad to see you! Rover! Rover! No—G-rover, Grover! That's his name!' The dog was once called Rover, but his name was changed to Grover in 1884, in honor of the election of Grover Cleveland."
The knowledge here may have been telepathic, but how about the dramatization?
Mrs. Piper's English Sittings of 1889-90 were held under the supervision of Sir Oliver Lodge and Dr. Walter Leaf, and the report of them has an introduction by Myers, and is followed by a statement of impressions of Mrs. Piper by James. All these experts expressed perfect confidence in the honesty of the medium, and that the phenomena were not explicable by any agency yet known to science.
Sir Oliver Lodge says (Pr. VI, 445):
"The details given of my family are just such as one might imagine obtained by a perfect stranger surrounded by the whole of one's relations in a group and able to converse freely but hastily with one after the other; not knowing them and being rather confused with their number and half-understood messages and personalities, and having a special eye to their physical weaknesses and defects. [Phinuit was (?) a doctor. Ed.] A person in a hurry thus trying to tell a stranger as much about his friends as he could in this way gather, would seem to me to be likely to make much the same kind of communication as was actually made to me."
Here is an episode explaining a nickname that Phinuit habitually applied to Sir Oliver (Pr. VI, 471f.):
"Cousin married, and the gentleman passed out at sea, round the sea.... Hullo, he's got funny buttons, big, bright.... A uniform. He has been a commander, an officer, a leader; not military, but a commander.... [A little further on Phinuit suddenly brings out the word Cap'n in connection with him, but, in a curious and half puzzled way, applies it to me. It remained my Phinuit nickname to the end, though quite inapplicable.] Your mother has got a good picture of him taken a long time ago, pretty good, old-fashioned, but not so bad of him. Yes, pretty good. He looks like that now. He looks younger than he did...."
As in this vision, so it was in one of my own dreams which I suspect was in several respects veridical; and in two other dreams where I cannot trace any veridicity: the persons had grown young.
This recalls Peter Ibbetson's statement that he and his beloved kept themselves about twenty-seven. There are reports that Peter Ibbetson is not all fancy, but even if it were, such reports would be inevitable.