recovery. The illness—blood-poisoning—in fact came on the day following the dream.[1]
In a case recorded by Mr. Glardon, his aunt, Mme. O. predicted early in August that her death would take place in six weeks. Mr. Glardon sent us a note of the prediction before the death was known, intimating that the period would expire on the 15th of September. As a matter of fact, the lady died on the 14th.[2]
These predictions occur, almost invariably, in trance or dreams, and the circumstances would seem occasionally to indicate that the subject of them is able, in the enlarged and more primitive stage of consciousness existing in those states, to perceive the latent presence of disease and the workings of organic processes, in himself or in others, which are hidden from the work-a-day self. More generally, however, the explanation is of a simpler kind. The prophecy is made to work out its own fulfilment; the seer sets his organism sub-consciously to explode in a predestined crisis, or to emerge in sanity from a self-imposed period of ill health.
Speaking generally this particular class of cases points at most to the vestiges of a lost power of forecasting or guiding organic processes, rather than to the rudiments of a new faculty transcending human limitations.[3]
