Knocking

Certainly I repeated my dream even before I left my room. I asked the housemaid whether she knew of any reason her fellow-servant might have to fear, or to hear bad news. She said, 'No,' and after that I told my sister. Nothing was said about the dream during Friday. On Saturday morning, when I returiied from a class — having dismissed the occurrence from my mind for the time — my sister immediately told me that the coincidence of dream and fact were marvellously similar. The poor woman whom I saw with such dumb appeal on her countenance, was alone, unable to speak, meeting her trouble alone, her husband, who is a policeman, being on night duty. She thought it was impossible to be heard, till she found a stick of his, and contrived to knock on the floor. Miss Harris's sister corroborates as follows : — March 16th, 1885. It was directly I came out of my room, before I went down stairs, that ray sister told me the dream she wrote to you about, and which she had dreamed between night and morning. tt tt .> ' Clara de H. Harris. are merely the sprinkling of fragments of genuine hallucination on a background of true perception ; and it is surely not more difficult to suppose that a mind which is telepathically affected can project its sensory delusion on some real figure which bears a general resemblance to the agent, than that it can project it in vacancy. But of course the coincidence with A's death of an illusion in which the perceiver mistook B for A would have far less force as evidence for telepathy than the coincidence with A's death of a hallucination representing him, simply because purely subjective mistakes as to identity are far commoner things than purely subjective hallucinations. To find the probability that a person will by accident make a particular mistake of identity on a particular day of his life, we must multiply the fraction ,,^ber of dlys of ms me ^1 ^^e number of similar mistakes, in similar circumstances of light, distance, &c,, that he makes altogether; and we must divide the result by the number of acquaintances any one of whom, if chance alone acted, is as likely as the one who died on the particular day to be the one wrongly identified on that day. This process may reduce the probability of a telepathic explanation of the coincidence from odds of millions to 1 (as found in the case of hallucinations, pp. 18-20) to odds of thousands to 1 ; but in a cumulative argument, odds of that magnitude are clearly not to be neglected. However, with regard to the following specimens, or most of t