An account

I have never had any other startling dream of the same nature, nor any dream from which I woke with the same sense of reality and distress, and of which the effect continued long after I was well awake. Nor have I upon any other occasion had a hallucination of the senses. The Times obituary for March 30th, 1880, records the death of Mr. R. B. Wingfield-Baker, of Orsett Hall, Essex, as having taken place on the 25th. The Essex Independent gives the same date, adding that Mr. Baker breathed his last about 9 o'clock. It will be seen here that the impression followed the death by a few hours — a feature which will frequently recur. The fact, of course, slightly detracts from the evidential force of a case, as compared with the completely simultaneous coincidences ; inasmuch as the odds against the accidental occurrence of a unique impression of someone's presence within a few hours of his death, enormous as they are, are less enormous than the odds against a similar accidental occurrence within five minutes of the death. But the deferment of the impression, though to this slight extent affecting a case as an item of telepathic evidence, is not in itself any obstacle to the telepathic explanation. We may recall that m some of the experimental cases the impression was never a piece of conscious experience at all ; while in others the latency and gradual emergence of the idea was a very noticeable feature (pp. 56, 63-71, 84). This justifies us in presuming that an impression which ultimately takes a sensory form may fail in the first instance to reach the threshold of attention. It may be unable to compete, at the moment, with the vivid sensory impressions, and the crowd of ideas and images, that belong to normal seasons of waking life ; and it may thus remain latent till darkness and quiet give a chance for its development. This view seems at any rate supported by the fact that it is usually at night that the delayed impression — if such it be — emerges into the percipient's consciousness. It is a ■■< 202 SPECIMENS OF THE VARIOUS TYPES [chap. supported also by analogies which recognised psychology supplies. I may refer to the extraordinary exaltation of memory sometimes observed in hypnotic and hystero-epileptic subjects ; or even to the vivid revival, in ordinary dreaming, of impressions which have hardly affected the waking consciousness. Mr. Wingfield's vision had another unusual feature besides the violence of its effect on him. It represented a single figure, without detail or incident. It was, so to s