This unique character is, no doubt, as we have seen, often asserted of dreams proper which afterwards prove to have coincided with reality. But there we lacked complete assurance that similar dreams which did not coincide with reality had not slipped out of memory. The impressions to be described in this chapter, on the other hand, have a character and an intensity which would ordinarily ensure their being remembered, even if no coincidence were established. Many of them, indeed, seem to have been distinctly waking impressions, belonging to a state of open eyes and alert senses, which was continued into normal waking life without any break or any feeling of change whatever. Still, as they occurred to persons who were in bed, and at seasons when the faculties are apt to be in an unstable condition, and when the stages of consciousness from moment to moment may be hard to define, it is safest to distinguish them from similar phenomena occurring during active waking hours, no less than from those of sleep.

1 I may explain that the statistics about hallucinations, of which use was made on the preceding page, were not the result of inquiries addressed to a known and limited number of persons, but of testimony which has reached me in the more general course of psychological investigation. For the purpose then in view - namely, to ascertain the proportion which "borderland" hallucinations bear to hallucinations in general - statistics thus drawn from an unlimited circle are of course in place. But it is quite a different matter when we wish to discover how common the phenomena are, in the sense of discovering what proportion of people have had experience of them. The only way, then, is to make a definite inquiry on the subject, of a certain number of persons, large enough to be accepted as a fair sample of the population. This method of numerical inquiry was exemplified to some extent in the discussion on dreams; but I am reserving for a separate chapter (Chap. xiii.) the more detailed account of it, and of its bearing on the theory that the coincidences on which stress is laid in this book were due not to telepathy but to chance.

I may quote at once a case which illustrates the immense importance to the argument of distinguishing the experiences of the "borderland" from those of sleep. The following passage occurs in the Life and Times of Lord Brougham, written by himself (1871), pp. 201-3, and was originally an entry in his journal. The entry must apparently have been made very soon after the occurrence which it describes; as we can scarcely doubt that had the fact of his friend's death, which he learnt soon afterwards, been known to him at the time of writing, he would have included it in the account. In December, 1799, Lord Brougham was travelling in Sweden with friends.

(146) "We set out for Gothenburg [apparently on December 18th], determining to make for Norway. About 1 in the morning, arriving at a decent inn, we decided to stop for the night. Tired with the cold of yesterday, I was glad to take advantage of a hot bath before I turned in, and here a most remarkable thing happened to me - so remarkable that I must tell the story from the beginning.

"After I left the High School, I went with G., my most intimate friend, to attend the classes in the University. There was no divinity class, but we frequently in our walks discussed and speculated upon many grave subjects - among others, on the immortality of the soul, and on a future state. This question, and the possibility, I will not say of ghosts walking, but of the dead appearing to the living, were subjects of much speculation: and we actually committed the folly of drawing up an agreement, written with our blood, to the effect that whichever of us died the first should appear to the other, and thus solve any doubts we had entertained of the 'life after death.'1 After we had finished our classes at the college, G. went to India, having got an appointment there in the Civil Service. He seldom wrote to me, and after the lapse of a few years I had almost forgotten him; moreover, his family having little connection with Edinburgh, I seldom saw or heard anything of them, or of him through them, so that all his schoolboy intimacy had died out, and I had nearly forgotten his existence.

I had taken, as I have said, a warm bath, and while lying in it and enjoying the comfort of the heat, after the late freezing I had undergone, I turned my head round, looking towards the chair on which I had deposited my clothes, as I was about to get out of the bath. On the chair sat G., looking calmly at me. How I got out of the bath I know not, but on recovering my senses I found myself sprawling on the floor. The apparition, or whatever it was, that had taken the likeness of G., had disappeared.

1 As to compacts of this sort see pp. 414-15.