419. Starting, then, not from savage authority, but from the evidential scrutiny of modern facts, we shall find, I think, that there are coincidences of dream with truth which neither pure chance nor any subconscious mentation of an ordinary kind will adequately explain. We shall find that there is a perception of concealed material objects or of distant scenes, and also a perception of or communion with the thoughts and emotions of other minds. Both these phenomena have been noted sporadically in many ages and countries, and were observed with serious attention especially by the early French mesmerists. The first group of phenomena was called clairvoyance or lucidit/, and the second communication de pensees, or in English, thought-transference. These terms are scarcely comprehensive enough to satisfy a more systematic study. The distant perception is not optical, nor is it confined even to the apparent sense of sight alone. It extends to all the senses, and includes also impressions hardly referable to any special sense. Similarly the communication between distant persons is not a transference of thought alone, but of emotion, of motor impulses, and of many impressions not easy to define.

I ventured in 1882 to suggest the wider terms telasthesia, sensation at a distance, and telepathy, fellow-feeling at a distance, and shall use these words in the present work. But I am far from assuming that these terms correspond with definite and clearly separated groups of phenomena, or comprise the whole field of supernormal faculty. On the contrary, I think it probable that the facts of the metetherial world are far more complex than the facts of the material world; and that the ways in which spirits perceive and communicate, apart from fleshly organisms, are subtler and more varied than any perception or communication which we know. Just as each organism is in fact a system of forces, influencing and influenced by similar systems of forces in known and unknown ways, so also must we regard human spirits as interacting systems of forces, yet more complex, and yet further beyond our ken. Specially manifest is this when we have to deal with pre?nonitions, of which a few instances are given in this chapter, which seem even further away from our ordinary processes of perception than the phenomena of telepathy or telæsthesia.

1 Cædmon's poem was traditionally said to have come to him in like fashion.

It follows from what has been said that there is no one logical order in which to arrange these supernormal phenomena. They do not spring one from another in traceable sequence; rather they are emergent and scattered manifestations of some deeper and more comprehensive law. The distinction suggested above between telepathy and telaesthesia - between supernormal knowledge apparently acquired through another mind, and supernormal knowledge apparently acquired directly, and without another mind's intervention - even this distinction, I say, cannot be made fundamental. We cannot really tell in what cases, and to what extent, some external mind has aided the percipient's perception of the distant scene. We do not even know whether in any supernormal perception one mind alone can be concerned.

420. I have hinted above at another line of demarcation which the dreamer's own sensations suggest, - the distinction between active psychical excursion or invasion and the passive reception of psychical invasion from without. But even here, as was also hinted, a clear line of division is hard to draw. For whether we are dealing with dream-perceptions of distant material scenes, or of distant living persons, or of discarnate spirits, it is often impossible for the dreamer himself to say either from what point he is himself observing, or where the scene of the vision is laid. Where is he when he is taking part in a scene which is still in the future ? and in what way does his apparent presence in the future scene differ from his apparent presence in an actually existing, although distant, scene; - in the midst of which his own phantasmal presence may perhaps be discerned by some one of the actors ? Our answers to such questions - imperfect at the best - must be deferred until we have before us not dreams alone, but that whole range of sensory Automatisms which bears throughout such perplexing relations to our current notions of Space and Time.

For the present I must confine myself to a brief sketch of some of the main types of supernormal dreams, arranged in a kind of ascending order. I shall begin with such dreams as primarily suggest a kind of heightening or extension of the dreamer's own innate perceptive powers, as exercised on the world around him. And I shall end with dreams which suggest his entrance into a spiritual world, where commerce with incarnate or discarnate spirits is subject no longer to the conditions of earthly thought.

421. I begin, then, with some dreams which seem to carry perceptive faculty beyond the point at which (as in Mr. Lewis's dream of the landing order, Section 416) some unusual form of common vision can be plausibly suggested in explanation. In the first of these cases (Mr. Squires's), given in full in 421 A, a young man sees in a dream the place where his friend's watch has fallen in a lonely field. In another case (Mr. Watts's, 421 B) there is a vision of a broken statue, whose injury seems to have been known to no other mind than the dreamer's; - so that we cannot here invoke - as we still might invoke in Mr. Squires's case - some subliminal knowledge of another man's as possibly suggesting the dream. And similarly in other cases cited in the Appendix, - while telepathy from the living or the dead may be theoretically conceivable, - the simplest hypothesis is that which goes no further than telaesthetic perception by the dreamer's own subliminal self.