An account

I did not know that John M. was ill, and had not even heard his name mentioned ; I could not trace any reason why he should have been in my thoughts. In answer to inquiries as to the second case, she says : — I recognised the little girl as the child of a friend. I had not heard anything about the child to make me dream of her. Charles P. had been dead for some years at the date of the dream. The absence of any ascertained coincidence on the third occasion might be represented as an argument for regarding the correspondence on the two previous occasions as accidental, but it would be a very weak one ; since even if the dream had recurred a thousand times, the chances against the accidental occurrence of two such coincidences would still remain enormous. The tendency on the dreamer's part to symbolise death in one particular way is neither against nor in favour of the telepathic explanation.1 While on the subject of symbolic dreams, I may observe that many persons profess to have a particular recurrent dream, which in itself has no obvious relation to death, but which proves in fact to coincide more or less closely with deaths or other calamities that affect them. I need hardly say that such statements have no evidential value, unless we can be sure that they are more than the loose assertions of persons who see no importance in noting misses as well as hits, and to whom it is no difficulty in the way of the supposed correspondence that the two events were separated perhaps by a month's interval. In most of such cases, indeed, the dream 1 It is worth noting that these dreams — for all their bizarrerie — seem to belong to a known type. Our friend, Mr. J. A. Symonds, has given us an account of a Swiss Todten- Volk-Seher, who sees a procession of the dead going along a path with a high bank on one side. 368 DREAMS WHICH MAY BE REASONABLY [chap. precedes the event and is professedly taken as a warning ; so that, however well attested, they could have no place in this book. Occasionally, however, a person who professes this remarkable gift can supply sufficiently circumstantial evidence to have some claim to attention ; and one rather striking instance of the sort will be found in the Supplement (case 460). § 8. I pass now to the final class of cases, where the dreamer seems, as it were, to be transported to the actual scene of the event. These cases, like the final cases of the 6th chapter, cannot but suggest certain phenomena of the waking state which are other than those of thought-transference —