Phantasms of the Living - Volume I.. Frank Podmore

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СКАЧАТЬ affections; and at every step of the transition we find instances which may reasonably be regarded as telepathic

      The great interest of the distinctly sensory specimens lies in the fundamental resemblance which they offer, and the transition which they form, to the externalised “phantasms of the living” which impress waking percipients; the difference being that the dream-percepts are recognised, on reflection, as having been hallucinatory, and unrelated to that part of the external world where the percipient’s body is; while the waking phantasmal percepts are apt to be regarded as objective phenomena, which really impressed the eye or the ear from outside

       § 2. But when Ave examine dreams in respect of their evidential value—of the proof which they are capable of affording of a telepathic correspondence with the reality—we find ourselves on doubtful ground. For (1) the details of the reality, when known, will be very apt to be read back into the dream, through the general tendency to make vague things distinct; and (2) the great multitude of dreams may seem to afford almost limitless scope for accidental correspondences of a dream with an actual occurrence resembling the one dreamt of. Any answer to this last objection must depend on statistics which, until lately, there has been no attempt to obtain; and though an answer of a sort can be given, it is not such a one as would justify us in basing a theory of telepathy on the facts of dreams alone

       § 3. Most of the dreams selected for this work were exceptional in intensity; and produced marked distress, or were described, or were in some way acted on, before the news of the correspondent experience was known. In content, too, they were mostly of a distinct and unusual kind; while some of them present a considerable amount of true detail

      And more than half of those selected on the above grounds are dreams of death—a fact easy to account for on the hypothesis of telepathy, and difficult to account for on the hypothesis of accident

       § 4. Dreams so definite in content as dreams of death afford an opportunity of ascertaining what their actual frequency is, and so of estimating whether the specimens which have coincided with reality are or are not more numerous than chance would fairly allow. With a view to such an estimate, a specimen group of 5360 persons, taken at random, have been asked as to their personal experiences; and, according to the result, the persons who have had a vividly distressful dream of the death of a relative or acquaintance, within the 12 years 1874-1885, amount to about 1 in 26 of the population. Taking this datum, it is shown that the number of coincidences of the sort in question that, according to the law of chances, ought to have occurred in the 12 years, among a section of the population even larger than that from which we can suppose our telepathic evidence to be drawn, is only 1. Now, (taking account only of cases where nothing had occurred to suggest the dream in a normal way,) we have encountered 24 such coincidences—i.e., a number 24 times as large as would have been expected on the hypothesis that the coincidence is due to chance alone

      Certain objections that might be taken to this estimate are to a considerable extent met by the precautions that have been used

       § 5. The same sort of argument may be cautiously applied to cases where the event exhibited in the coincident dream is not, like death, unique, and where, therefore, the basis for an arithmetical estimate is unattainable

      But many more specimens of a high evidential rank are needed, before dreams can rank as a strong integral portion of the argument for telepathy. Meanwhile, it is only fair to regard them in connection with the stronger evidence of the waking phenomena; since in respect of many of them an explanation that is admitted in the waking cases cannot reasonably be rejected

      PART. II.—EXAMPLES OF DREAMS WHICH MAY BE REASONABLY REGARDED AS TELEPATHIC.

       § 1. Examples of similar and simultaneous dreams

      An experience which has coincided with some external fact or condition may be described as a dream, and yet be sufficiently exceptional in character to preclude an application of the theory of chances based on the limitless number of dreams

       § 2. Examples of the reproduction, in the percipient’s dream, of a special thought of the agent’s, who is at the time awake and in a normal state

       § 3. Examples of a similar reproduction where the agent is in a disturbed state

       § 4. Cases where the agent’s personality appears in the dream, but not in a specially pictorial way. Inadmissibility of dreams that occur at times of anxiety, of dreams of trivial accidents to children, and the like

       § 5. Cases where the reality which the eyes of the agent are actually beholding is pictorially represented in the dream. Reasons why the majority of alleged instances must be rejected

      The appearance in the dream of the agent’s own figure, which is not presumab y occupying his own thoughts, suggests an independent development, by the percipient, of the impression that he receives

       § 6. The familiar ways in which dreams are shaped make it easy to understand bow a dreamer might supply his own setting and imagery to a “transferred impression.” Examples where the elements thus introduced are few and simple

       § 7. Examples of more complex investiture, and especially of imagery suggestive of death. Importance of the feature of repetition in some of the examples

       § 8. Examples of dreams which may be described as clairvoyant, but which still must be held to imply some sort of telepathic “agency”; since the percipient does not see any scene, but the particular scene with some actor in which he is connected

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      CHAPTER IX.

      “BORDERLAND” CASES.

       § 1. The transition-states between sleeping and waking—or, more generally, the seasons when a person is in bed, but not asleep—seem to be specially favourable to subjective hallucinations of the senses; of which some are known as illusions hypnagogiques; others are the prolongations of dream-images into waking moments; and some belong to neither of these classes, though experienced in the moments or minutes that precede or follow sleep

       § 2. It is not surprising that the same seasons should be favourable also to the hallucinations which, as connected with conditions external to the percipient, we should describe, not as subjective, but as telepathic

      As evidence for telepathy, impressions of this “borderland” type stand on an altogether different footing from dreams; since their incalculably smaller number supplies an incalculably smaller field for the operation of chance

      Very great injustice is done to the telepathic argument by confounding such impressions with dreams.; as where Lord Brougham explains away the coincidence of a unique “borderland” experience of his own with the death of the friend whose form he saw, on the ground that the “vast numbers of dreams” give any amount of scope for such “seeming miracles”

       § 3. Examples where the impression was not of a sensory sort

       § 4. Example of an apparently telepathic illusion hypnagogique

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