(131) "The dream which I am about to relate occurred about 2 years ago. I seemed to be walking in a country road, with high grassy banks on either side. Suddenly I heard the tramp of many feet. Feeling a strange sense of fear, I called out, ' Who are these people coming? ' A voice above me replied, ' A procession of the dead.' I then found myself on the bank, looking into the road where the people were walking, five or six abreast. Hundreds of them passed by me - neither looking aside nor looking at each other. They were people of all conditions and in all ranks of life. I saw no children amongst them. I watched the long line of people go away into the far distance, but I felt no special interest in any of them, until I saw a middle-aged Friend, dressed as a gentleman farmer. I pointed to him and called out, ' Who is that, please? ' He turned round and said in a loud voice, ' I am John M., of Chelmsford.' Then my dream ended. Next day, when my husband returned from his office he told me that John M., of Chelmsford, had died the previous day.

"I may add that I only knew the Friend in question by sight and cannot recollect ever speaking to him".

We find from a newspaper obituary that J. M.'s death took place on January 14th, 1880.

(132) " About a year ago, I had a dream very similar to the preceding one. The locality was the same. The only difference was that I was standing in the road, trying to prevent a little girl from joining the procession. The lady, in whose charge the child was and who was standing by me in the road, said, ' I am giving her into the charge of Charles P., of Darlington,' mentioning the name of a well-known member of the Society of Friends. I replied, ' That is not Charles P'. I called out as before, ' Who are you, please? ' A young man in the procession turned round and said, 'I am J. G.' Next morning I heard that J. G. had died rather suddenly in the night. I knew this young man, but not intimately, and I had not seen him for months.

"Again, a third time, I found myself in the same place, but my terror was so extreme, that I kneeled on the bank and prayed that I might not witness the march of the dead. Instantly I was removed, and the tramp of the terrible procession ceased. I never discovered that anyone whom I knew died at the time of this last dream.

"In each of these three dreams I seemed to be under the influence and dread of some unseen power, "Marie Hilton".

In answer to inquiries as to the first of these cases, Mrs. Hilton says: -

"I did not know that John M. was ill, and had not even heard his name mentioned; I could not trace any reason why he should have been in my thoughts".

In answer to inquiries as to the second case, she says: -

"I recognised the little girl as the child of a friend. I had not heard anything about the child to make me dream of her. Charles P. had been dead for some years at the date of the dream".

The absence of any ascertained coincidence on the third occasion might be represented as an argument for regarding the correspondence on the two previous occasions as accidental, but it would be a very weak one; since even if the dream had recurred a thousand times, the chances against the accidental occurrence of two such coincidences would still remain enormous. The tendency on the dreamer's part to symbolise death in one particular way is neither against nor in favour of the telepathic explanation.1

While on the subject of symbolic dreams, I may observe that many persons profess to have a particular recurrent dream, which in itself has no obvious relation to death, but which proves in fact to coincide more or less closely with deaths or other calamities that affect them. I need -hardly say that such statements have no evidential value, unless we can be sure that they are more than the loose assertions of persons who see no importance in noting misses as well as hits, and to whom it is no difficulty in the way of the supposed correspondence that the two events were separated perhaps by a month's interval. In most of such cases, indeed, the dream precedes the event and is professedly taken as a"warning "; so that, however well attested, they could have no place in this book.