Every one has heard relations of prophetic dreams which seem to imply a sense of unconscious sight going far beyond the limits of our conscious visual perceptions. It may be that, even as certain vibrations can be sent and received without any transmitting medium except the atmosphere, by wireless, certain visual information can be received, at times, under certain conditions, without any perception of such phenomena reaching the consciousness.

At the same time, this is a field on which one must tread most carefully, for telepathy has never been studied very scientifically and the telepathic dreams which have been related to me or which I have read about had been recorded rather carelessly and the circumstances surrounding them had not been noted with the regard for accuracy which must characterize scientific research.

A few times in my life, I have had the infinite surprise when lifting the telephone receiver, of hearing the voice of the very person I was going to call up and who had called me up at the same minute. On the other hand, I have endeavoured with the help of very intimate friends to effect synchronic transmission of thought and have failed dismally on every occasion.

While I have never had prophetic dreams I have recorded one dream of mine which might be characterized as a “second sight” dream.

One day I mislaid some documents which once belonged to my father.

That night my father appeared to me and pointed to a desk drawer where the papers would be found. The next morning I looked in that drawer and found the documents.

I certainly placed the documents myself in that drawer the day before and forgot the fact. But the unconscious memory of that action was retained and came up at night while my mind was at work solving the problem of the lost documents.

If that explanation should meet with scepticism I would remind the reader that the wealth of information with which our unconscious is filled permits of unconscious mental operations of which in our conscious states we would be incapable. Janet’s subject, Lucie, who was lacking in mathematical ability, could, in her unconscious states, perform calculations of an extreme complication. He would give her under hypnosis the following order: “When the figures which I am going to read off to you, leave six when subtracted one from the other, make a gesture of the hand.” Then he would wake her up, and ask several people to talk to her and to make her talk. Standing at a certain distance from her, he would then read rapidly in a low voice a list of figures, but when the appropriate figures were read, Lucie never failed to make the gesture agreed upon.

We notice thousands of things unconsciously, which means simply that every sensorial impression causes a modification of our autonomic system and probably of our sensory-motor system which is never completely effaced.

During our waking hours only those memory impressions which are needed rise to consciousness. The many observations we have made, consciously or otherwise, enable us to calculate the distance between us and an automobile, the speed of that automobile, the width of the street, the dryness or the slippery conditions of the pavement, and to select the time for crossing as well as the speed at which we shall cross.

In our sleep, when we are revolving the day’s problems and searching for solutions, many other facts, stored up in our nervous systems, rise to consciousness and are used in solving the problem.In the personal case I cited, my unconscious applied its searchlight to recent events; in other cases reported in the literature of the subject the unconscious is shown bringing back events which seemed to have been entirely forgotten.

Our organism never forgets.

Forgotten incidents which suddenly rise to consciousness in dreams are sometimes responsible for visions which on superficial observation appear truly prophetic. Maury cites the following in his book on “Sleep and Dreams”:

“Mr. F. decided once to visit the house where he had been brought up in Montbrison and which he had not seen in twenty-five years. The night before he started on his trip, he dreamt that he was in Montbrison and that he met a man who told him he was a friend of his father. Several days later, while in Montbrison he actually met the man he had seen in his dream and who turned out to be some one he really knew in his childhood, but had forgotten in the intervening years. The real person was much older than the one in the dream, which is quite natural.”

One finds in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research many remarkable examples of dreams which, to the uninitiated, appear truly miraculous. Remembering, however, the wonders accomplished by Lucie under the influence of a hypnotic command, we may realize that the book-keepers who suddenly find in a dream the mistakes which have prevented them from balancing their books, or the various people who locate missing objects, are simply continuing in their sleep the day’s work, drawing no longer upon their limited store of conscious memories and impressions, but upon all the wealth of information which is contained in their unconscious.

Even the famous dream of Professor Hilprecht loses much of its glamour when viewed from this angle. Hilprecht had spent quite some time trying to decipher two small fragments of agate which were supposed to belong to the finger rings of some Babylonian god. He had given up the task and classified the fragments as undecipherable in a book on the subject. One night he had put his “o. k.” on the final proofs of that book, feeling, however, rather dissatisfied at his inability to account for the inscriptions found on those ancient stones. He went to bed, weary and exhausted and had a remarkable dream: A tall, thin priest of Nippur appeared to him, led him to the treasure chamber of the temple of Bel and told him that the two fragments in question should be put together, as they were, not finger rings, but earrings made for a god by cutting a votive cylinder into three parts. The next morning he did as the dream priest had told him to do, and was able to read the inscription without any difficulty.

I have received many letters from persons relating that they had dreamt of the San Francisco earthquake, of the sinking of the Lusitania, of the death of some friend or relative the very night preceding the event.

I show in another chapter how treacherous and unreliable our memory of dreams can be at times.

Happenings following quickly the awakening are likely to become “parasites” on the night’s dreams and to appear as a component part of them.

Time and over again, the newspaper one reads at breakfast adds details to the night’s remembered dreams. Reading about some accident in the early morning may cause us to believe that we dreamt of the accident in the course of the night.

When the German submarines began to sink passenger ships, thousands of dreamers who either wished unconsciously for such sinkings or feared them (which is generally the same thing) and many also who craved the excitement such catastrophes would bring them, must have had dreams in which large ships were sunk. And those thousands must have impressed themselves and their family circle by announcing, when the morning newspaper came out, that they had seen the tragedy enacted in a dream.

Here again we are groping our way over uncharted fields and not until thousands of scientific observations made with the care characteristic of the chemical laboratory have been made, all explanations will only be tentative and all positive statements misleading.

Those mentioning such dreams to me have at times been rather annoyed when I made them confess the wish lurking in them.

One man told me that he had three brothers at the front during the war and that in a dream he saw one of them killed by the Germans. Soon afterward, news of his death reached the family.

I asked him point blank why he wanted to get rid of that brother. He avoided giving me a direct answer but admitted that if one of the three was to die, the one whose death he saw in his dream would be least missed by his family as he had always made trouble and was the “black sheep.”...

Even in such cases the wish fulfilment theory holds good.