Page:Faithhealingchri00buckiala.djvu/155

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DREAMS, NIGHTMARE, AND SOMNAMBULISM
141

belonged to normal senses and waking life, and that it may thus remain latent until darkness and quiet give a chance for its development." The same sort of reasoning might be applied to account for the fact that such information is not universally communicated. It is flying about loose in the heavens and in the earth; but, not being able to compete with the crowd of images in any except few cases, does not generally materialize.

When they come to cases where the dreams contain the general feature of conversation between the dreamer and the agent, they say, "This is, of course, a clear instance of something superadded by the dreamers own activity"; and when the circumstances of the death do not concur with it, they claim a fulfilment, and attribute a failure to agree to a death imagery superadded by the independent activity of the dreamer.

"Where a woman dreams twice of death and it is fulfilled, and she also has the candor to state that on another occasion she dreamed of a death and nothing came of it, they say:

The absence of any ascertained coincidence on the third occasion might be represented as an argument for regarding the correspondence on the two previous occasions as accidental, but it would be a very weak one; since even if the dream had recurred a thousand times, the chances against the accidental occurrences of two such coincidences would still remain enormous.

Many of the cases they cite depend upon vague memory, and others do not supply adequate particulars.

Their general method of writing about these dreams and of the whole theory of telepathy is that of an affectionate mother lingering over her child, and wherever coddling is necessary doing it con amore.

There are two radical defects to be seen in the entire