Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. F. W. H. Myers
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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 analogy 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 class 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 "palæolithic psychology" has gone out of fashion for the last few centuries, I do not think that (in view of the telæsthetic 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 lucidité, and the second communication de pensées, 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 telæsthesia, 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 assuming 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 passive 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 circumstances 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:—
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