662. There are, on the other hand, a good many cases where a scene thus discerned in a flash is one of special interest to the percipient, although no one in the scene may have actually wished to transfer it to him.

A case again of a somewhat different type is the sudden waking vision of Mr. Gottschalk (662 B), who sees in a circle of light the chalked hands and ruffled wrists of Mr. Courtenay Thorpe - a well-known actor - who was opening a letter of Mr. Gottschalk's in that costume at the time. Trivial in itself, this incident illustrates an interesting class of cases, where a picture very much like a crystal-vision suddenly appears on a wall or even in the air with no apparent background.

I know one or two persons who have had in their lives one single round or oval hallucinatory picture of this kind, of which no interpretation was apparent, - a curious indication of some subliminal predisposition towards this somewhat elaborate form of message.

Somewhat like Mr. Gottschalk's projection of his picture upon a background of dark air are two experiences of Mr. Searle (662 C) and of Mrs. Taunton (662 D) - excellent informants - which I give next with an important note of Edmund Gurney's on the occasional transparency of these phantasmal pictures. Gurney regards this transparency as indicating imperfect externalisation of the hallucinatory image.

My own phrase, "imperfect co-ordination of inner with outward vision," comes to much the same thing, and seems specially applicable to Mrs. Taunton's words: "The appearance was not transparent or filmy, but perfectly solid-looking; and yet I could somehow see the orchestra, not through, but behind it." There are a few cases where the percipient seems to see a hallucinatory figure behind him, out of the range of optical vision (see the case of Mr. Kearne, 665 A). There is of course no reason why this should not be so, - even if a part of space external to the percipient's brain should be actually affected.

Mr. Searle's case also is very interesting. Here Mrs. Searle faints when visiting a house a few miles from Mr. Searle's chambers in the Temple. At or about the same sime, he sees as though in a looking-glass, upon a window opposite him, his wife's head and face, white and bloodless.

Gurney suggests that this was a transference from Mrs. Searle's mind simply of "the idea of fainting," which then worked itself out into perception in an appropriate fashion.

Was it thus? Or did Mr. Searle in the Temple see with inner vision his wife's head as she lay back faint and pallid in Gloucester Gardens?

Our nearest analogy here is plainly crystal-vision; and crystal-visions, as we have observed, point both ways. Sometimes the picture in the crystal is conspicuously symbolical; sometimes it seems a transcript of an actual distant scene.