Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) (1556 page)

Such an experience is so very unlike the vast majority of psychic cases that one is inclined to push it aside. If one cannot get a document into a pigeon-hole, one is too ready with a waste-paper basket, and it is this human tendency which has retarded our advance in this new science. Anyone who carefully reads the narrative of these ladies, and notices the points of resemblance and also the very interesting points of divergence in their stories, cannot fail to take them seriously. It was not imagination or suggestion or, so far as one can judge, hallucination. But what it was, and why by some strange psychic refraction this mirage of the past should be thrown down upon the present, is an insoluble problem. It must at least teach us that, however much our tiny brains may endeavour to comprehend and classify these extraordinary phenomena, there still remain so many unknown causes and unexplained conditions that for many a long year to come our best efforts can only be regarded as well-meant approximations to the truth.

II
I

NOTES FROM A STRANGE MAIL-BA
G

THE DREAMERS

 
For many years I have been the recipient of as strange a shower of letters as one could imagine. They come from all sorts of folk who have had all sorts of psychic experiences. They demand sympathy, advice and explanation. The former I can give, but the latter are not always so easy. The handling of this correspondence has added a burden to my already over-weighted days, but it is not work which I can hand to a delegate, since very often fine points of knowledge are involved, and the letters are exceedingly confidential and personal. I am glad to think that I have left few unanswered, but it has been at the expense of much energy and time which might, perhaps, have been better employed in some more general fashion. And yet some good end might be attained if I could use them discreetly in order to ventilate in public the various matters discussed.

If the reader likes to treat the cases as instances of delusion or of peculiar mental aberration that is for his own judgment to decide. I only put forward the letters as being very real facts to those who wrote them. The rest is a matter of individual opinion. From my cabinet of tabulated drawers I take down the one which is labelled “Dreams,” and I pick a few of the contents almost at haphazard.

Here is a very vivid letter from a lady who is herself a musical composer. She dreamed that she was in the presence of a great celestial choir. Her account is an arresting one, and none can doubt that some tremendous impact had been made upon her mind.

“The orchestra was of vast size — something like the seating capacity of the Albert Hall. The conductor and the singers were on my right, but after they started playing I realised that they were all round me, and there was a great bank of strings on my left. They were playing what seemed like the end of a classical symphony and the speed they took it at far exceeded any tempo I’ve heard here. It was like a sea of bows flashing up and down. As I watched them a curious thing happened. It seemed as if the senses of sight and sound merged into one faculty, and that I could
see
the vibrations from those violins. You remember the spray mist which hangs over Niagara Falls. Just such a shimmering haze seemed to float above the players. The other thing that struck me was the ideal beauty of the ensemble. That mighty host of players were like one thought and action. It so far exceeded anything I have heard here as to be almost overpowering. My own sense of perfection could hardly stretch to it. It was marvellous. Of course, my thoughts are continually on music and rehearsals, so that itself would not convey much, but this idea of seeing sound vibrations had never entered my conscious thoughts, and that is the most vivid impression of the dream.”

Though the lady did not know it, the idea of the close connection between colour and sound is one which has frequently come to us in what purported to be descriptions of life in the Beyond. I could very readily find a dozen illustrations of the fact among those posthumous accounts which profess to describe the experiences which await us. The general idea of concerted music is also very familiar. “I play in an orchestra and I enjoy it so much.” Such was a message which I received myself recently from a friend who was fond of music. Lester Coltman the Guardsman, in what is asserted to be his after-death experience, says:

“Orchestration is my great hobby here,” and adds: “For some time after I passed over I was undecided as to whether music or science should be my work. After much serious thought, I determined that music should be my hobby and my more earnest intent should be directed upon science in every form.”

It may be said generally that the evidence of psychic research agrees with the vague Christian tradition that music plays a large part in the higher spheres.

The next letter which I pick up deals with a very much less elevated impression. This is an American writing from San José, California, who dreams names.

“If I can identify the name with some race-horse, I have found that the horse has, nine times out of ten, won the race. I am not interested in horse-racing, and have not been on a track for twenty years.”

The next letter is also about horse-racing, from a retired Captain in Ireland. In his case he claims to get a picture, not a name. He is not a betting man and makes no use of his information, which is just as well for the bookies. Going over his results, I find that he seldom got a winner, but that his horses were invariably placed. It was a curious dumb-crambo system of conveying names, when supplied by vision, but occasionally they came in an audible voice at the moment of waking from sleep. What are we to make of such an experience? Is it imagination followed by coincidence? Or is it of some humble psychic origin? We have to place on the other side the many cases where such dreams have betrayed us. Only last year I had the experience of backing the dream of a friend for the Derby, and being five pounds poorer as a consequence.

The next letter takes us back into the black days of the War. It is from an English lady living in Finland. Her younger brother was killed at the front in one of the final battles in a dawn attack. At that hour the lady went through his whole experience, visualised the battlefield, heard the guns, and saw an elderly and moustached German who threw something — presumably a bomb — which struck her down. Some nights later she had a second equally vivid dream in which a radiant spirit led her along a poplar-lined French road and halted at last at the spot where the dead body of her brother was lying. She declares that she had every reason at the time to think that her brother was at a depot and not in the firing-line. It was after the Armistice that official news was given of his death. This is one of a class of cases which has been so common that no reasonable man can deny them. To explain them is another matter, for even if one accepts the full faith of Spiritualism there is a good deal which is inexplicable.

The next item is from the West of America. The writer has three times during ten years had an extraordinary and very vivid dream which has always been the same. He was in each case commanding the bodyguard of an Oriental Sultan and had to defend a palace attacked by rebels. On each occasion he was killed and found himself after death looking down upon a litter of dead bodies. The country in which these incidents occurred gradually revealed itself to him as being Oman upon the east coast of Arabia, and the dreamer actually opened a correspondence with the Sultan of Muscat, a letter from whom he enclosed to me as a proof of good faith. The Sultan took a lively interest in the matter and was anxious that the dreamer should visit him, but the coming of the War intervened. The American protests that he is still planning to go to Muscat, though one would have thought that it is the one place which he would have carefully avoided. No sequel has yet been reported, though the letter is two years old.

I pick up a letter now which is of a most interesting type. It is from a lady in Chicago. She lay at the point of death with a temperature of 105°. She was insensible but dreaming vividly. She seemed to hear music of unearthly beauty, and to be surrounded by the faces of many loved ones who had passed on. The only sensation was one of delicious languor.

“It was the most vivid and beautiful dream I ever experienced. When I came to myself I thought that if death was like that I should not mind going at any time. Is it then possible for the soul to leave the body for a short while and then to return again?”

My answer was that I had numerous similar cases which seemed to show that it
was
possible, and that such knowledge did indeed remove all fear of death.

The next letter is also from an American lady and is not very dissimilar in its subject. It was not the weakness of disease but it was the emotion produced by music which, in her case, seems to have effected a temporary dissociation between soul and body. The opera was “Manon Lescaut” and Caruso the singer.

“At the grand climax,” she writes, “I seemed to float away upward, quite overwhelmed. After the curtain fell I was still away. The live part of me had separated from my body and it was with the greatest difficulty that I forced myself together. With a look of consternation the lady next me observed my condition.”

Reduced to common speech all this simply means that the lady was on the point of fainting, and yet it may make us ask ourselves what we mean exactly when we use the phrase.

The dream which duplicates an actual occurrence is hard to explain, but an even tougher problem is presented by the prophetic dream which gives a picture of the future. My next letter is from a man in Liverpool who found himself in his sleep standing by a railway station and looking up a sloping road with another road at right angles at the top. There was a bridge above him, and over the bridge came a tramcar on which was painted some strange place names of which he had never heard. Some months later he visited Wrexham for the first time and there he found the station, the road, the slope, the bridge and the tram, which had Welsh names on the outside. Nothing arose from the incident, and there seemed no possible reason why it should have been shot into the sleeper’s mind months beforehand. In the case of this and similar incidents which are both trivial and psychic, one can only suppose that an attempt is made — we cannot say by whom — to awaken the interest of the recipient in spiritual matters by showing him things which are outside the ken of material science. It certainly has such an effect, for the man who has had such an experience is far more open afterwards to psychic knowledge. An alternative explanation would be that in one of those nocturnal rambles which our souls or etheric bodies do seem to take, the dreamer had visited Wrexham — possibly drawn by the fact that he had relatives living there — and that he chanced to carry back some memory of its appearance. The tram might well be running in the early morning.

A second experience by the same gentleman rather supports the latter explanation. He dreamed that he saw a lady friend working at some pink material. On inquiry she said, “Yes, I stayed up late last night making a crêpe de Chine blouse of pink stuff, which I particularly wished to finish.” Since she was late it is probable that his dream saw that which was actually occurring at the moment, and that it was an instance of what has been called “travelling clairvoyance” where the etheric body brings back information — surprisingly trivial information at times — to the unconscious material brain.

The next item is less complex. It comes from Battersea. A Mrs. Arbuthnot dreamed that her life was threatened by a friend whom we will call Mrs. Burton. When she told the dream she was not aware that Mrs. Burton had at that time a maniacal attack in which she imagined she had some deadly grievance against her friend. This would appear to be a clear case of telepathy. I may add that telepathy, which is constantly given as an explanation of other psychic happenings, is, in my opinion, among the less common phenomena, and is by no means so clearly established as some of the physical manifestations.

To return to prophetic dreams: they are occasionally of a very helpful character, as the next example will show. The writer is a Manchester man fresh from Cambridge. During a visit to Switzerland he dreamed that he was in a tropical land, sandy, with a shimmering heat and an intensely blue sky. Suddenly, a huge man appeared before him holding a triangular dagger of peculiar shape, with which he made the motion of striking. He then vanished. Next day the youth explored a disused tunnel.

“I went in and found magnificent icicles hanging from the roof. All at once I saw one very large one. It was triangular and came to a sharp point. I thought of my dream, and recognised the triangular dagger. I stopped, and at that moment the whole thing fell with a crash. It must have weighed at least two hundred pounds and would perhaps have killed me.”

What are we to make of this? Is it not beyond coincidence? And how are we to explain the tropical scene? I would only suggest — but with all reserve — that many of us believe that we have guides or guardian angels. These guides would appear to be often drawn from the Oriental races. Supposing that this youth’s guide was an Egyptian he might, in warning his pupil, have brought back with him some impression of his native land. The student remarked that the dagger was of a shape which was once used in Ancient Egypt. Such an explanation may stand until a better one is found.

A number of these dreams are concerned with objects which have been lost and found again by revelation. There is always the consideration that such finds may have been the result of some subconscious train of thought, as occurs so often in our everyday experience, when the solution of some problem wells suddenly up from the unknown depths of our mentality. But in some cases this would seem to be impossible. Here, for example, is a letter from Bath. The writer was a solicitor in a South African city. He had a client to whose father in early days a grant of land had been made on the outskirts of the city. At the time it was of no value, but as the city spread it became so, but very many years had passed and the grant was lost. One night the client dreamed where it was. Next day, accompanied by a resident who knew the town well, he walked to the place of his dream, identified a certain cottage, had his knock answered by a lady whom he had seen in his sleep, walked through to an outhouse, opened an old box and plucked out the grant which had been stuffed into an envelope tacked to the inside of the lid. It is sad to relate that after all this trouble the grant was not admitted by the new generation of officials. But the story told as it is by the solicitor concerned, seems to be incontrovertible. What are we to make of it? Here, again, we seem to be balanced between the possibilities of the wandering soul and those of external intelligence. In any case, such incidents deserve our best consideration, and our men of Science may well turn their minds from the insects and the stones in order to unravel problems so intimately related to our own nature and fate.