Again, dreams are of little account unless the coincidence is very striking, and unless the dreams themselves are distinguished from the common ruck of our nightly visitants by some unusual quality—e. g., by their superior vividness or by the intensity of the emotion which accompanies them.
B even when the dream is well attested, when the experience was unusually vivid, and the coincidence striking, there are many cases in which the dream can be explained by normal causes. There are, for instance, several dreams in our collection dealing with lost property; a brooch hidden under leaves and loose gravel in the garden, a box of stolen property secreted by burglars in the coal cellar—to quote two instances only—have been recovered through dreams. But in cases of this kind it is probable that the dream may be founded on slight indications actually seen by the eyes, which failed in the crowd of waking sensations to gain attention at the time, and did not actually emerge into consciousness until sleep offered a vacant opportunity. Again, we have a case in which an American bank director was awakened from his sleep by the noise of a heavy explosion, dressed himself, and went out in the town to see what had happened. Notwithstanding the fact that on that very night the safe at a bank thirty miles away in which he had a large interest was blown up by dynamite, I should hesitate, in view of the frequency of unexplained noises, to ascribe a dream
