On New Year's Eve, 1852, I awoke about 12.40 a.m. and found my room so brilliantly illuminated that I imagined I had forgotten to put out my candle and that something must have caught fire. I got up and on looking round, saw at the foot of the bed a coffin resting on chairs, on each of which was a silver candlestick with a large wax taper alight; in the coffin was a figure of my father. I put out my hand and touched him, when it became quite dark. I felt for my matchbox and lighted a candle, looked at my watch and wrote down the time.

The next morning I told a friend, with whom I was staying in Paris at the time, and on the morning of the 2nd of January we received a letter from Marseilles, saying that my father had died suddenly at 12.40 on New Year's Eve, and that he had expressed such a strong wish to see his youngest child (i.e., myself) again just before his death.

EDITOR'S NOTE

This is an absolutely classic Victorian account of a psychic dream (or vision; it doesn't seem clear even to Anonymous 63) about the death of a loved one--their obsession almost to the exclusion of other subjects as unworthy. In that generation researchers saw perfect timing as important (to show this might be realtime communication with a still-living spirit, not a traditional ghost-haunting, or "mere" clairvoyance, or prediction of the news in the letter); Anon 63 knows this, and thus notes the time and tells the dream the next day, to get it on record.

This single book, Phantasms of the Living, contains hundreds of similar anomalous experiences carefully logged and analyzed. All that care is wasted of course--not because such experiences are nonsense, but because the current scientific mainstream isn't interested in evidence; all that matters is that current theories require such experiences to be nonsense. The Victorians were in many ways brutally conformist, but our time's equally conformist--and more intellectually dishonest.

After all, in real life many of us experience accurate premonitions and hunches all the time, and not just about big matters like death; that is a Victorian (and pre-Victorian) assumption, only disproven firmly in the 1920s by JW Dunne--and when I replicated his experiments, I found he was right: we pick up remote and future information all the time and let it steer us; ESP is as common as dirt. We just don't usually notice it. Only crises, like this one, reach consciousness.

--Chris Wayan

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sh - Si-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites