They did not visit persons who were familiar with such visions as sleep approached; nor did they originate or develop in any way that suggests an unusual or fatigued condition of the retina. Nor again could by any means all of them be explained, like M. Maury's beefsteak, as "after-images" - revivals of past impressions; for out of the 43 cases first mentioned only 23, out of the 66 other cases only 26, represented a face, form, or object that was recognised; while in several even of these cases the person whose figure appeared was a deceased friend or relative who had not been actually seen for months or years. Similarly, of 187 first-hand cases of auditory hallucination in my collection, 63, or more than one-third of the whole number, took place in bed. Of these, 19 are described as either awakening the person, or occurring in the very first moment of waking, and in 10 of the 19 the sound was a recognised voice; of the remaining 44, 17 were unrecognised voices, 11 were non-vocal sounds such as ringings and knocks, and only 16 represented recognised voices.

It would seem, then, that the reasons which make bed a specially favourable place for such experiences are to be sought, not only in peculiarities of the sense-organs at the moments immediately contiguous to sleep, but in the more general conditions of quiet and found he was a dirty-linen bag, with the neck tied. Not till I actually clutched the neck was I convinced." Mr. Merrifield, of 24, Vernon Terrace, Brighton - with whom figures seen on waking last long enough for him "to reason that though 1 have been mistaken before, there can be no mistake this time, and to insist upon this to my wife, who remonstrates " - says, "If there is any light object in the room or any dress or polished piece of furniture on which the light falls, my figure generally shapes itself about that." Even a persistent dream-image may attach itself to an external basis. Thus Miss I. Bidder, of Ravensbury Park, Mitcham, tells me of a nightmare from which a most distinct demon survived after she woke. She sat up to inspect its hand, which was clutching the bed-rail; but "it faded into the ornaments over the mantelpiece".

Wo may regard as the lowest grade of such illusion the impression of waking among unknown surroundings. Thus one correspondent tells me that she has "watched the room gradually take its usual form, which on first waking had been some place quite different." And another informant writes: "The room I apparently woke in was a large room, with the chief space between the foot of the bed and the opposite boundary wall, which looked an immense way off, and the light did not appear to come in at the right place, though on the same side of the room as the window really was. I lay and pondered, feeling as if there was something inexplicable in the place, sure that I was wide awake. As I wondered, all the strangeness of the room and the added space vanished, and I found myself again in a small, narrow room, with the wall almost close to the bottom of the bed".

§ 2. At any rate, bed being - from whatever causes - a place favourable to phantasms, it is reasonable to surmise that it may be a place favourable to the phenomena with which we are concerned in this book - the phantasms that coincide with reality. And such, in fact, it proves to be. Considering how small a portion of our waking life is included in the few moments after waking from sleep, or even in the short periods of wakefulness that normal healthy persons pass in bed, it is remarkable how large a proportion of our veridical examples (a number little less than the total of dreams, and amounting to about a fourth of the externalised waking cases) fall within these seasons. And regarded as evidence of telepathy, it will be seen that these cases stand on an altogether different footing from the dream-cases proper with which they have seemed in one way so closely allied. Dreams, as we saw, are so frequent and various as to afford an immense scope for accidental coincidences; it is far otherwise with these borderland impressions, or, at any rate, with those of them which the perceiver himself is able clearly to differentiate from dreams.

If I have called them the commonest form of waking hallucination among sane and healthy people, this is not to be understood as meaning that they are absolutely common; on the contrary, they are decidedly exceptional. Out of 5569 persons, taken at random, I find that only 18 are able to recall having within the last twelve years had a visual experience, and only 23 an auditory experience, of this kind.1 If then we find a considerable number of cases where an experience of the sort has coincided with the death (or some distinct crisis in the life) of the person whose presence the hallucination suggested, the fact is at once noteworthy; and the number of such coincidences that we can adduce forms a strong and independent proof - far stronger, at any rate, than was afforded by our list of coincident dreams - that telepathy and not accident is the explanation of them. Nor is the comparatively small number of persons who have experience of distinct "borderland" hallucinations the only point wherein this class is superior in evidential force to dreams. We can here, as a rule, be far more certain that the particular impression recorded was really of a sort unique or highly exceptional in the particular percipient's experience.