Vanishing suddenly

October 18th, 1884. (149) I very distinctly remember that one day, a few years ago, my father lay down for a few minutes, as at that time usual before going to his office in the afternoon. Seated on a stool beside him, and with my left hand enfolded in one of his, I read the book in which I was at the time interested, for 5 or possibly 7 minutes. At the end of that time he turned his face towards me, and seeing that the room was shaded, remarked : ' Anna, you will injure your eyes reading in this dim light.' ' And I do not particularly like this book,' I responded. I held in my hand a historical novel, the name of which I am sorry I cannot recollect, but I remember vividly that the passage I had just read purported to be one of the last scenes in the life of Marie Antoinette, and I remember as distinctly that in that scene a tall man carried a coffin from a room in which Marie Antoinette and some attendant ladies were at the time standing. I remember that in the story that tall man stood prominently in the foreground, and that my mind was strained under the part he took in that scene almost to the verge of repugnance. In reply to my father's question why I did not like the book, I replied in substance as in the foregoing, and he immediately told me that he had just seen what I had described, and had opened his eyes and turned his face towards me to dissipate the scene, which for the moment he had looked upon as an isolated phantasm. 1 a Anna m. Deering. Mr. Deering writes : — Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. October 21st, 1884. While I lay with my daughter's hand in mine, as she relates in the accompanying memoir, 1 fell into the semi-slumber usual with me on lying down to rest for a few minutes after my luncheon, early in the afternoon. At these times I very seldom fall asleep, but simply into a species of slumber, in which I frequently find myself in a kind of rayless or moonless moonlight, looking, and this usually with serene pleasure, at nearby gardens, slopes, rivulets, and various little vistas, which more times than otherwise vanish at my bidding, and except I fall asleep, are immediately replaced by others. Sometimes these are peopled with 1 A parallel case, where a dream seems to have been suggested by what someone else had been silently reading, is No. 407 in the Supplement. ix.] BORDERLAND CASES. 401 apparently living figures, and frequently these also dissolve at my bidding and are replaced by others. There is, however, this difference ; any control I exercise for the purpose of a change se