The other evening I was discussing with two friends the possibility of telepathy and clairvoyance in dream. It was apropos of J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time.

I was told that Dunne after experiments of his own, had recommended his friends to examine their dreams and see how each of their contents referred to events of two days forward and how much to those of two days back.

We all agreed that in sleep, particularly exhausted sleep, the mind is more subject to telepathic suggestion or to premonitions of the future than when it is awake: because less critical. With that conversation in my mind I went to bed, and had an uncomfortable waking up two or three times. The last series, in the early morning, I remembered most vividly.

The chief scene was where I was being introduced to a man who came up to me at a cocktail bar and shook my hand saying: 'Perhaps you prefer not to meet me; my name is Oscar Wilde.'

With him were two others whom I knew to be writers of the same literary period, and I liked neither of them.

The scene faded. There came a queer word, flashed on the screen of my mind. It was in capitals, and it was either TELPOE or TELTOE, PELTOE or TELSOE, or something like that. In my dream it baffled me, and when I awoke it baffled me.

Well, on the second day I had a letter which had been four days in transit. It had been written in Northumberland, and forwarded from Islip, near Oxford, where I used to live. It was from one Mr. Roberts, a stranger to me, and was for some minutes completely unintelligible :

"'Attercop, the all-wise spider.'
The poet at Islip scrawled;--Re
Oscar Wilde at the tipplers;
'Whistler, do let's appreciate
Walter Pater's polish, deceit.'

Something is wrong with these anagrams, I fancy. I lack the monkey-wit to worry them out. What did you intend? I can think of dozens more. It must be pure chance."

Mr. Roberts apparently had been reading my poem and worrying what 'Attercop' meant. And it had so preyed on his mind that he had suspected it to be an anagram. So he took the whole phrase, 'Attercop, the all-wise spider,' and tried to make sense out of the letters. He made four anagrams from this phrase, and put them one under the other to form a single nonsensical sentence. And still could think of dozens more.

Now, as a matter of fact, there is no mystery about 'Attercop.' Attercop is merely an old Scottish word for a spider. The story of Bruce and the Spider was originally the story of Bruce and the Attercop. You'll find it in any fair-sized dictionary. Attercop survived in the words 'cob-web' and 'cob-spider.' I had wanted an archaic word for spider, and so naturally used Attercop.

But the business about Oscar Wilde, the cocktail bar, the two literary friends--a mad story originating with the anagrams--somehow invaded my dream, and the word telpoe, peltoe, or telsoe seems to have been a residue of letters that Mr. Roberts tried to make use of in an anagram by allowing them to form a proper name (and I had been to the trouble of trying to find the word in the Times Atlas and Larousse's Dictionary of Names!)

Two queer things in this story are that, first, the letter was written two days before my dream and reached me two days after my dream: and, second, that I was probably myself responsible for the whole incident. For I had written (but not published) a poem about the curious effect of anagrams, and had it strongly in my mind about the time that Roberts wrote his letter to me. In it I coined the word 'anagrammagic.' My wireless vibrations, it seems, somehow affected him while he was reading the Attercop poem, and his, in revenge, disturbed my dreams.

SOURCE: The Dream World by Rodolphe L. Megroz, pp.16-18.

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