Page:The Naturalisation of the Supernatural.pdf/242

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
222
Phantasms of the Dead

resemble the dead man, but the resemblance is to the figure familiar to the percipient in life. It is, in other words, open to us to suppose that the clothing and imagery are supplied by the percipient's own imagination. There is rarely any novel feature of costume; rarely any communication to other senses than that of sight. It is, generally speaking, in the narratives which deal with remoter experiences that the more sensational details are apt to appear. In short, statements written down many years after the event to which they relate have a tendency to conform more closely to the traditional type. But though in the best attested accounts of waking hallucinations we can find few parallels to the repentant monk, the troubled miser, or the conscientious debtor of the popular imagination, we do in dreams find many cases where purpose and knowledge are shown which apparently point to the agency of the deceased. That such indications practically occur only in dreams is not in itself a suspicious circumstance. Dreams no doubt, as already pointed out, have less ostensive value than waking visions, because of the greater scope for chance coincidence. But, on the other hand, we have good reason to believe that telepathic communication of all kinds is most readily established when, as in sleep or trance, the faculties which deal with the life of relation are in abeyance. We have no reason therefore for distrusting the accuracy of a dream story, on the sole ground that it imports sensational features of the kind referred to.