Veracious Dreams. Past, Present and Future unknown Events "revealed".Theory of "Mental Telegraphy" or "Telepathy" fails to meet Dreams ofthe unknowable Future. Dreams of unrecorded Past, how alone they canbe corroborated. Queen Mary's Jewels. Story from Brierre deBoismont. Mr. Williams's Dream before Mr. Perceval's Murder.Discrepancies of Evidence. Curious Story of Bude Kirk. Mr.Williams's Version. Dream of a Rattlesnake. Discrepancies. Dream ofthe Red Lamp. "Illusions Hypnagogiques." The Scar in the Moustache.Dream of the Future. The Coral Sprigs. Anglo-Saxon Indifference. ACeltic Dream. The Satin Slippers. Waking Dreams. The Dead Shopman.Dreams in Swoons.Perhaps nothing, not even a ghost, is so staggering to the powers ofbelief as a well-authenticated dream which strikes the bull's eye offacts not known to the dreamer nor capable of being guessed by him.If the events beheld in the dream are far away in space, or are remotein time past, the puzzle is difficult enough. But if the events arestill in the future, perhaps no kind of explanation except a mere"fluke" can even be suggested. Say that I dream of an event occurringat a distance, and that I record or act on my dream before it iscorroborated. Suppose, too, that the event is not one which could beguessed, like the death of an invalid or the result of a race or of anelection. This would be odd enough, but the facts of which I dreamedmust have been present in the minds of living people. Now, if thereis such a thing as "mental telegraphy" or "telepathy," {28} my mind,in dream, may have "tapped" the minds of the people who knew thefacts. We may not believe in "mental telegraphy," but we can_imagine_ it as one of the unknown possibilities of nature. Again, ifI dream of an unchronicled event in the past, and if a letter of somehistorical person is later discovered which confirms the accuracy ofmy dream, we can at least _conceive_ (though we need not believe) thatthe intelligence was telegraphed to my dreaming mind from the mind ofa _dead_ actor in, or witness of the historical scene, for the factsare unknown to living man. But even these wild guesses cannot cover adream which correctly reveals events of the future; events necessarilynot known to any finite mind of the living or of the dead, and toofull of detail for an explanation by aid of chance coincidence.In face of these difficulties mankind has gone on believing in dreamsof all three classes: dreams revealing the unknown present, theunknown past, and the unknown future. The judicious reasonably setthem all aside as the results of fortuitous coincidence, or revivedrecollection, or of the illusions of a false memory, or of imposture,conscious or unconscious. However, the stories continue to be told,and our business is with the stories.Taking, first, dreams of the unknown past, we find a large moderncollection of these attributed to a lady named "Miss A---". They werewaking dreams representing obscure incidents of the past, and werelater corroborated by records in books, newspapers and manuscripts.But as these books and papers existed, and were known to exist, beforethe occurrence of the visions, it is obvious that the matter of thevisions _may_ have been derived from the books and so forth, or atleast, a sceptic will vastly prefer this explanation. What we need isa dream or vision of the unknown past, corroborated by a document _notknown to exist_ at the time when the vision took place and wasrecorded. Probably there is no such instance, but the following tale,picturesque in itself, has a kind of shadow of the only satisfactorysort of corroboration.The author responsible for this yarn is Dr. Gregory, F.R.S., Professorof Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh. After studying for manyyears the real or alleged phenomena of what has been called mesmerism,or electro-biology, or hypnotism, Dr. Gregory published in 1851 hisLetters to a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism.Though a F.R.S. and a Professor of Chemistry, the Doctor had no moreidea of what constitutes evidence than a baby. He actually mixed upthe Tyrone with the Lyttelton ghost story! His legend of Queen Mary'sjewels is derived from (1) the note-book, _or_ (2) a lettercontaining, or professing to contain, extracts from the note-book, ofa Major Buckley, an Anglo-Indian officer. This gentleman used to"magnetise" or hypnotise people, some of whom became clairvoyant, asif possessed of eyes acting as "double-patent-million magnifiers,"permeated by X rays."What follows is transcribed," says the Doctor, "from Major Buckley'snote-book." We abridge the narrative. Major Buckley hypnotised ayoung officer, who, on November 15, 1845, fell into "a deeper state"of trance. Thence he awoke into a "clairvoyant" condition and said:--
