Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 11

A striking ill.u.s.tration may be drawn from the following incident in the story of Krafft-Ebing's patient,[43] Ilma S., the genuineness of whose stigmata seems proved by that physician's care in observation, and by the painfulness of certain experiments performed upon her by students as practical jokes and against her will:--

_May 6th, 1888._--The patient is disturbed to-day. She complains to the sister of severe pain under the left breast, thinks that the professor has burnt her in the night, and begs the sister to obtain a retreat for her in a convent, where she will be secure against such attacks. The sister's refusal causes a hystero-epileptic attack. [At length, in the hypnotic trance] the patient gives the following explanation of the origin of the pain: "Last night an old man came to me; he looked like a priest and came in company with a Sister of Charity, on whose collet there was a large golden B. I was afraid of her. The old man was amiable and friendly. He dipped a pen in the sister's pocket, and with it wrote a W and B on my skin under the left breast. Once he dipped his pen badly and made a blot in the middle of the figure. This spot and the B pain me severely, but the W does not. The man explained the W as meaning that I should go to the M church and confess at the W confessional."

After this account the patient cried out and said, "There stands the man again. Now he has chains on his hands."

When the patient woke into ordinary life she was suffering pain in the place indicated, where there were "superficial losses of substance, penetrating to the corium, which have a resemblance to a reversed W and B," with "a hyperaemic raised spot between the two."

Nowhere in this peculiar neurotrophic alteration of the skin, which is identical with those previously produced experimentally, are there traces of inflammation. The pain and the memory of the dream were removed by the doctor's suggestion; but the dream self-suggestion to confess at the M church persisted; and the patient, without knowing why, did actually go and confess to the priest of her vision.

In this last case we have a dream playing the part of a powerful post-hypnotic suggestion. The meaning of this vague term "suggestion" we shall have to discuss in a later chapter. It is enough to notice here the great power of a subliminal suggestion which can make an impression so much stronger not only than the usual evanescent touch of dream, but than the actual experiences of waking day.

But this case may also serve to lead us on to further reflections as to the connection between dream-memory and hypnotic memory, a connection which points, as we shall presently see, towards the existence of some subliminal continuity of memory, lying deeper down than the evocable memory of common life--the stock of conscious reminiscences on which we can draw at will.

With regard to memory, as with regard to sensation, we seem in waking life to be dealing with a selection made for purposes of earthly use.

From the pre-conscious unselective memory which depends on the mere organisation of living matter, it is the task of consciousness, as it dawns in each higher organism, to make its own appropriate selection and to develop into distinctness certain helpful lines of reminiscence. The question of self-preservation--What must I needs be aware of in order to escape my foes?--involves the question, What must I needs remember in order to act upon the facts of which I am aware? The selected currents of memory follow the selected avenues of sensation; what by disuse I lose the power of noticing at the time, I also lose the power of recalling afterwards.

For simpler organisms this rule may perhaps suffice. Man needs a more complex formula. For it may happen, as we have already seen, that two or more phases of personality in one man may each select from the ma.s.s of potential reminiscences a special group of memories of its own. These special groups, moreover, may bear to one another all kinds of relations; one may include another, or they may alternate and may be apparently co-exclusive.

From these dissociations and alternations of memory there will be many lessons to learn. The lesson which here presents itself is not the least important. What is the relation of the sleeping state to these dissociated, these parallel or concentric memories? Is it the case that when one memory includes another it is the waking memory--as one might expect from that state's apparently superior vividness--which shows itself the deeper, the more comprehensive record?

The answer of actual experience to these questions is unexpectedly direct and clear. In every recorded instance--so far at least as my memory serves me, where there has been any _unification_ between alternating states, so as to make comparison possible--it is the memory furthest from waking life whose span is the widest, whose grasp of the organism's upstored impressions is the most profound. Inexplicable as this phenomenon has been to observers who have encountered it without the needed key, the independent observations of hundreds of physicians and hypnotists have united in affirming its reality. The commonest instance, of course, is furnished by the ordinary hypnotic trance. The degree of intelligence, indeed, which finds its way to expression in that trance or slumber varies greatly in different subjects and at different times. But whensoever there is enough of alertness to admit of our forming a judgment, we find that in the hypnotic state there is a considerable memory--though not necessarily a complete or a reasoned memory--of the waking state; whereas with most subjects in the waking state--unless some special command be imposed upon the hypnotic self--there is no memory whatever of the hypnotic state. In many hysterical conditions also the same general rule subsists; namely, that the further we get from the surface the wider is the expanse of memory which we encounter.

If all this be true, there are several points on which we may form expectations definite enough to suggest inquiry. Ordinary sleep is roughly intermediate between waking life and deep hypnotic trance; and it seems _a priori_ probable that its memory will have links of almost equal strength with the memory which belongs to waking life and the memory which belongs to the hypnotic trance. And this is in fact the case; the fragments of dream-memory are interlinked with both these other chains. Thus, for example, without any suggestion to that effect, acts accomplished in the hypnotic trance may be remembered in dream; and remembered under the illusion which was thrown round them by the hypnotiser. Thus Dr. Auguste Voisin suggested to a hypnotised subject to stab a patient--really a stuffed figure--in the neighbouring bed.[44]

The subject did so; and of course knew nothing of it on waking. But three days afterwards he returned to the hospital complaining that his dreams were haunted by the figure of a woman, who accused him of having stabbed and killed her. Appropriate suggestion laid this ghost of a doll.

Conversely, dreams forgotten in waking life may be remembered in the hypnotic trance. Thus Dr. Tissie's patient, Albert, dreamt that he was about to set out on one of his somnambulic "fugues," or aimless journeys, and when hypnotised mentioned to the physician this dream, which in his waking state he had forgotten.[45] The probable truth of this statement was shown by the fact that he did actually set out on the journey thus dreamt of, and that his journeys were usually preceded and incited by remembered dreams.

I need not dwell on the existence, but at the same time the incompleteness, of our dream-memory of waking life; nor on the occasional formation of a separate chain of memory, constructed from successive and cohering dreams. It should be added that we do not really know how far our memory in dream of waking life may have extended; since we can only _infer_ this from our notoriously imperfect waking memory of past dreams.

A cognate antic.i.p.ation to which our theory will point will be that dream-memory will occasionally be found to fill up gaps in waking memory, other than those due to hypnotic trance; such so-called "ecmnesic" periods, for instance, as sometimes succeed a violent shock to the system, and may even embrace some s.p.a.ce of time _anterior_ to the shock. These periods themselves resemble prolonged and unremembered dreams. Such accidents, however, are so rare, and such dream-memory so hard to detect, that I mention the point mainly for the sake of theoretical completeness; and must think myself fortunate in being able to refer the reader to a recent case of M. Charcot's which affords an interesting confirmation of the suggested view.[46]

I pa.s.s on to the still more novel and curious questions involved in the apparent existence of a dream-memory which, while accompanying the memory of ordinary life, seems also to have a wider purview, and to indicate that the record of external events which is kept within us is far fuller than we know.

Let us consider what stages such a memory may show.

I. It may include events once known to the waking self, but now definitely forgotten.

II. It may include facts which have fallen within the sensory field, but which have never been supraliminally "apperceived" or cognised in any way. And thus also it may indicate that from this wider range of remembered facts dream-_inferences_ have been drawn;--which inferences may be _retrospective_, _prospective_, or,--if I may use a word of Pope's with a new meaning, _circ.u.mspective_,--that is to say, relating not to the past or to the future, but to the present condition of matters beyond the range of ordinary perception. It is plain that inferences of this kind (if they exist) will be liable to be mistaken for direct retrocognition, direct premonition, direct clairvoyance; while yet they need not actually prove anything more than a perception on the part of the subliminal self more far-reaching,--a memory more stable,--than is the perception or the memory of the supraliminal self which we know.

These hypermnesic dreams, then, may afford a means of drawing our lines of evidence more exactly; of relegating some marvellous narratives to a realm of lesser marvel, and at the same time of realising more clearly what it is in the most advanced cases which ordinary theories are really powerless to explain.

As to the _first_ of the above-mentioned categories no one will raise any doubt. It is a familiar fact--or a fact only sufficiently unfamiliar to be noted with slight surprise--that we occasionally recover in sleep a memory which has wholly dropped out of waking consciousness.

In such cases the original piece of knowledge has at the time made a definite impress on the mind,--has come well within the span of apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness. Its reappearance after however long an interval is a fact to which there are already plenty of parallels. But the conclusion to which some cases seem to me to point is one of a much stranger character. I think that there is evidence to show that many facts or pictures which have never even for a moment come within the apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness are nevertheless retained by the subliminal memory, and are occasionally presented in dreams with what seems a definite purpose. I quote an interesting case in Appendix IV. A.[47]

The same point, as we shall hereafter see, is ill.u.s.trated by the phenomena of crystal-vision. Miss Goodrich-Freer,[48] for example, saw in the crystal the announcement of the death of a friend;--a piece of news which certainly had never been apprehended by her ordinary conscious self. On referring to the _Times_, it was found that an announcement of the death of some one of the same unusual name was contained in a sheet with which she had screened her face from the fire;--so that the words may have fallen within her range of vision, although they had not reached what we broadly call her waking mind.

This instance was of value from the strong probability that the news could never have been supraliminally known at all;--since it was too important to have been merely glanced at and forgotten.

In these cases the dream-self has presented a significant scene,--has chosen, so to say, from its gallery of photographs the special picture which the waking mind desired,--but has not needed to draw any more complex inference from the facts presumably at its disposal. I have now to deal with a small group of dreams which reason as well as remember;--if indeed in some of them there be not something more than mere reasoning on facts already in some way acquired,--something which overpa.s.ses the scheme prescribed for the present chapter.

In the first place we cannot doubt that definite data already known may sometimes be treated in somnambulism or ordinary dream with more than waking intelligence. Such are the cases of mathematical problems solved in somnambulism, or of the skeletal arrangement discovered by Aga.s.siz in common sleep for scattered bones which had baffled his waking skill. I give in Appendix IV. B. the striking case of Professor Hilprecht where dream-intelligence is carried to its highest point. Professor Romaine Newbold (who records the case) is well versed in the a.n.a.lysis of evidence making for supernormal powers, and his explanation of the vision as the result of "processes of a.s.sociative reasoning a.n.a.logous to those of the upper consciousness" must, I think, be taken as correct.

But had the incident occurred in a less critical age of the world,--in any generation, one may say, but _this_,--how majestic a proof would the phantasmal Babylonian's message be held to have afforded of his veritable co-operation with the modern _savant_ in the reconstruction of his remote past!

I repeat that with this case of Professor Hilprecht's we seem to have reached the utmost intensity of sleep faculty within the limits of our ordinary spectrum. In almost every region of that spectrum we have found that the sleeper's faculty, under its narrow conditions, shows scattered signs of at least a potential equality with the faculty of waking hours.

We have already seen this as regards muscular movements, as regards inward vision and audition, and as regards memory; and these last records complete the series by showing us the achievement in sleep of intellectual work of the severest order. Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_ had long ago shown the world that a great poet might owe his masterpiece to the obscuration of waking sense.[49] And the very imperfection of _Kubla Khan_--the memory truncated by an interruption--may again remind us how partial must ever be our waking knowledge of the achievements of sleep.

May I not, then, claim a real a.n.a.logy between certain of the achievements of _sleep_ and the achievements of _genius_? In both there is the same triumphant spontaneity, the same sense of drawing no longer upon the narrow and brief endurance of nerves and brain, but upon some unknown source exempt from those limitations.

Thus far, indeed, the sleep-faculties which we have been considering, however strangely intensified, have belonged to the same cla.s.s as the normal faculties of waking life. We have now to consider whether we can detect in sleep any manifestation of _supernormal_ faculty--any experience which seems to suggest that man is a cosmical spirit as well as a terrestrial organism, and is in some way in relation with a spiritual as well as with a material world. It will seem, in this view, to be natural that this commerce with a spiritual environment should be more perceptible in sleep than in waking. The dogma which my point of view thus renders probable is perhaps, as a mere matter of history, the dogma of all dogmas which has been most universally believed by mankind.

"_Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_"--for how many narrow theological propositions have we not heard this proud claim--that they have been believed everywhere, and by everybody, and in every age? Yet what can approach the antiquity, the ubiquity, the unanimity of man's belief in the wanderings of the spirit in dream? In the Stone Age, the sceptic would have been rash indeed who ventured to contradict it. And though I grant that this "palaeolithic psychology" has gone out of fashion for the last few centuries, I do not think that (in view of the telaesthetic evidence now collected) we can any longer dismiss as a mere _bizarrerie_ of dream-imagery the constant recurrence of the idea of visiting in sleep some distant scene,--with the acquisition thereby of new facts not otherwise accessible.

Starting, then, not from savage authority, but from the evidential scrutiny of modern facts, we shall find, I think, that there are coincidences of dream with truth which neither pure chance nor any subconscious mentation of an ordinary kind will adequately explain. We shall find that there is a perception of concealed material objects or of distant scenes and also a perception of a communion with the thoughts and emotions of other minds. Both these phenomena have been noted sporadically in many ages and countries, and were observed with serious attention especially by the early French mesmerists. The first group of phenomena was called _clairvoyance_ or _lucidite_, and the second _communication de pensees_, or in English, _thought-transference_. These terms are scarcely comprehensive enough to satisfy a more systematic study. The distant perception is not _optical_, nor is it confined even to the apparent sense of sight alone. It extends to all the senses, and includes also impressions hardly referable to any special sense.

Similarly the communication between distant persons is not a transference of thought alone, but of emotion, of motor impulses, and of many impressions not easy to define. I ventured in 1882 to suggest the wider terms _telaesthesia_, sensation at a distance, and _telepathy_, fellow-feeling at a distance, and shall use these words in the present work. But I am far from a.s.suming that these terms correspond with definite and dearly separated groups of phenomena, or comprise the whole field of supernormal faculty. On the contrary, I think it probable that the facts of the metetherial world are far more complex than the facts of the material world; and the ways in which spirits perceive and communicate, apart from fleshly organisms, are subtler and more varied than any perception or communication which we know.

I have halted above at another line of demarcation which the dreamer's own sensations suggest,--the distinction between active psychical excursion or invasion and the pa.s.sive reception of psychical invasion from without. But even here, as was also hinted, a clear line of division is hard to draw. For whether we are dealing with dream-perceptions of distant material scenes, or of distant living persons, or of discarnate spirits, it is often impossible for the dreamer himself to say either from what point he is himself observing, or where the scene of the vision is laid.

For the present I must confine myself to a brief sketch of some of the main types of supernormal dreams, arranged in a kind of ascending order.

I shall begin with such dreams as primarily suggest a kind of heightening or extension of the dreamer's own innate perceptive powers, as exercised on the world around him. And I shall end with dreams which suggest his entrance into a spiritual world, where commerce with incarnate or discarnate spirits is subject no longer to the conditions of earthly thought.

I begin, then, with some dreams which seem to carry perceptive faculty beyond the point at which some unusual form of common vision can be plausibly suggested in explanation. Mr. Lewis's dream of the landing-order (Appendix IV. A) may be taken as an instance of such a dream.[50]

I will next refer to certain cases where the sleeper by clairvoyant vision discerns a scene of direct interest to a mind other than his own;--as the danger or death of some near friend. Sometimes there is a flash of vision, which seems to represent correctly the critical scene.

Sometimes there is what seems like a longer gaze, accompanied, perhaps by some sense of _communion_ with the invaded person. And in some few cases--the most interesting of all--the circ.u.mstances of a death seem to be symbolically _shown_ to a dreamer, as though by the deceased person, or by some intelligence connected with him. (See Mrs. Storie's narrative p. 109.)

One of the best instances of the flash of vision is Canon Warburton's, which I quote from _Phantasms of the Living_, vol. i. p. 338--a case whose remoteness is rendered less of a drawback than usual by the character of the narrator and the simplicity and definiteness of the fact attested.

The following is his account:--

THE CLOSE, WINCHESTER, _July 16th, 1883_.

Somewhere about the year 1848 I went up from Oxford to stay a day or two with my brother, Acton Warburton, then a barrister, living at 10 Fish Street, Lincoln's Inn. When I got to his chambers I found a note on the table apologising for his absence, and saying that he had gone to a dance somewhere in the West End, and intended to be home soon after one o'clock. Instead of going to bed, I dozed in an arm-chair, but started up wide awake exactly at one, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. "By Jove! he's down!" and seeing him coming out of a drawing-room into a brightly illuminated landing, catching his foot in the edge of the top stair, and falling headlong, just saving himself by his elbows and hands. (The house was one which I had never seen, nor did I know where it was.) Thinking very little of the matter, I fell a-doze again for half an hour, and was awakened by my brother suddenly coming in and saying, "Oh, there you are! I have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck as I ever had in my life. Coming out of the ballroom, I caught my foot, and tumbled full length down the stairs."

That is all. It may have been "only a dream," but I always thought it must have been something more.

W. WARBURTON.

In a second letter Canon Warburton adds:--

_July 20th, 1883._

My brother was hurrying home from his dance, with some little self-reproach in his mind for not having been at his chambers to receive his guest, so the chances are that he was thinking of me.

The whole scene was vividly present to me at the moment, but I did not note particulars any more than one would in real life. The general impression was of a narrow landing brilliantly illuminated, and I remember verifying the correctness of this by questions at the time.

This is my sole experience of the kind.