connection: for we do not know enough of the surrounding circumstances. But we may note, as probably not without significance, the fact that the telepathic message came just at the moment when the news of the death was known, or might have been known, to persons in the vicinity of the percipient—that is, when the possibility of thought-transference from the living had been established.
There is a case recorded in Phantasms of the Living (vol. i., p. 365), in which Mrs. Menneer saw in a dream the body of her brother, Mr. Wellington, standing by her bedside, with his head lying on a coffin by his side. Mr. Wellington had actually been decapitated by the Chinese at about the time of the dream—the exact date of the dream cannot now be fixed.
To Mr. Gurney the interpretation of the dream on the hypothesis of thought-transference from the living presented some difficulties: it seemed necessary to suppose that Mr. Wellington had dramatised his own fate at the moment of death. But we have since learnt that the head was given up to Mr. Wellington's friends on the following day, and a telepathic message from their minds is thus suggested as a possible explanation.[1]
Several cases have been reported to us in which a dying man has seen the figure of a friend, of whose death he could not have been aware by ordinary means. In some of these cases the fact was
- ↑ See Mr. Myers's comments on the case, Proceedings, S. P. R., vol. viii., p. 208. See also, in this connection. Cases 39, 40, and 41. Chapter VI.
