§ 4. We come now to the larger family of cases, in which the agent's personality, and not merely his particular thought, is reflected, and the dream conveys a true impression of his state, or of some event connected with him. I will first give a few examples where the fact which is a reality is presented or suggested without the agent's visible appearance in the dream, and without any distinct sense on the percipient's part of being present at the scene.

[Cases 102 and 103 are here omitted].

The next case, in its absurdity and precision, is a great contrast to the last [a death case]. We received it from the Rev. A. B. McDougall, now of Hemel Hempsted, and at that time a scholar of Lincoln College, Oxford.

"November, 1882.

(104) " On the night of January 10th, 1882, I was sleeping in one of the suburbs of Manchester in the house of a friend, into which house several rats had been driven by the excessive cold. I knew nothing about these rats, but during the night I was waked by feeling an unpleasantly cold something slithering down my right leg. I immediately struck a light and flung off the bed-clothes, and saw a rat run out of my bed under the fireplace. I told my friend the next morning, but he tried to persuade me I had been dreaming. However, a few days afterwards1 a rat was caught in my room. On the morning of January nth, a cousin of mine [Miss E. J. M. McDougall, since married], who happened to be staying in my own home on the south coast, and to be occupying my room, came down to breakfast, and recounted a marvellous dream, in which a rat appeared to be eating off the extremities of my unfortunate self. My family laughed the matter off. However, on the 13th, a letter was received from me giving an account of my unpleasant meeting with the rat and its subsequent capture.

Then everyone present remembered the dream my cousin had told certainly 58 hours before, as having occurred on the night of January 10th. My mother wrote me an account of the dream, ending up with the remark, ' We always said E. was a witch: she always knew about everything almost before it took place.' "A. B. McDougall".

Here the point, of course, is that an exceedingly improbable incident is associated in the dream with the right person. It is worth noting that we have no exact parallel to such an incident as this among our waking cases. Thus, if the dream was telepathic, its very triviality may illustrate in a new way the favourable effect of sleep on the percipient faculty.

Dreams happening at times when the person dreamt of is known to be in peril are, as a rule, inadmissible as evidence. Thus we have a case where the mother of a lieutenant in the army dreamt, on the night of the storming of the Redan, that her son was wounded in the left arm. The subsequent newspaper account described him as having been severely injured in the right arm; but his mother persisted in her view that the dream was correct, and it proved to have been so. But a dream concerning a wound is a very likely one for a mother to have under the circumstances; and the detail is quite insufficient. In the class we must include mothers' dreams of accidents to children, even apart from any special grounds of anxiety - the form of dream being not uncommon, and real accidents (if we include trivial ones) being frequent enough to make it certain that striking coincidences will every now and then occur by chance. Thus the wife of a rector in the West of England tells us how she once dreamt that one of her little girls, who was on a visit, had fallen down in the street and cut her forehead over the left eye, and how the morning's post brought the news of that precise accident.

The rector (who is sceptical on these matters) testifies to the fact that his wife mentioned to him her dream " that the child had fallen down and cut her forehead "; and also to the fact that " the next post brought the news." He says nothing about the street or the left eye - details which may have been read back into the dream afterwards. But in any case the accident is of a common type; the amount of correct detail is small; and moreover it came out in conversation with the lady that she dreams a good deal, and pays attention to her dreams. However completely telepathy were established, it might still be doubted whether such a coincidence as this ought to be referred to it.

1 There is a slight apparent discrepancy between these words and the date of the letter in which the capture is afterwards said to have been mentioned. The letters are destroyed; and Mr. McDougall rightly prefers to leave the words as they stand. They, of course, in no way affect the central incident.

As an interesting contrast, I may quote the following case, which is from Mrs. Hobbs (wife of the Rev. W. A. Hobbs, formerly a missionary at Beerbhoom, Bengal), now resident at Tenbury, in Worcestershire. The narrative was first written out for a friend, probably in 1877.

(105) "During our residence in India as missionaries, our children remained at home, either residing with my sister or at school, and about the year 1864 or 1865 our eldest boy was at school at Shireland Hall near to Birmingham. The principal was the Rev. T. H. Morgan, now Baptist minister at Harrow-on-the-Hill.

" One night, during the summer of one of the years I have mentioned, I was awakened from my sleep by my husband asking, ' What is the matter, J.? Why are you weeping so? I could let you sleep no longer, you were crying so much.' I replied that I was dreaming, but could not tell the dream for some minutes. It had seemed so like a reality that I was still weeping bitterly.

"I dreamed that the sister (who acted as guardian to our boys in our absence) was reading to me a letter giving a detailed account of how our Harry died of choking, while eating his dinner one day at school.

"When sufficiently composed I again went to sleep; but when I awoke in the morning, the effect of my dream was still upon me. My husband tried to rally me, saying, ' It is only a dream, think no more about it.' But my heart was sad, and I could not shake it off.

"In the course of the day I called on a friend, the only other European lady in the station. I told her why I felt troubled, and" she advised me to make a note of the date, and then I should know how to understand my dream when a letter of that date came to hand. Our letters at that time came to us vid Southampton, and nearly six weeks must elapse before I could hear if anything had transpired on that particular date, even if a letter could have been dispatched at once; but it might not have been the 'mail day,' and that would give some additional days for me to wait. They were weary weeks, but at length the looked-for letter arrived, and it contained no reference to what I had anticipated. I felt truly ashamed that I had permitted a dream to influence me, and thought no more about it.

"A fortnight later another letter from my sister came in, bearing an apology for not having told me in her last what a narrow escape from death our Harry had experienced, and then went on to detail what I had dreamed, with an additional piece of intelligence that just as his head had dropped on the person supporting him, and he was supposed to be dead, the piece of meat passed down his throat, and he shortly after revived, and was quite well at the time of her writing.

"That boy is now a minister of the Gospel, and about a year ago I was talking with him about my strange dream, when a friend who was present said to him, ' Do you remember what you thought about when you were choking? ' He replied, ' Yes, I distinctly remember thinking, I wonder what my mother will do when she hears I am dead.' "

In answer to our inquiries, Mrs. Hobbs says: -

"July 24th, 1884.

" I have not had any other dream of a like kind. I am not able to say how near in time the dream was to the event; but that it was very near to the event is clear from the fact that I reckoned up the earliest time when I could get any information from England, supposing that the dream really pointed to anything; and though no news came to the time expected, yet the next letter that came apologised for not having mentioned it in the former letter. So that the space between the event and the dream would be, at most, the space between the dream and the next mail leaving England for India".

Mr. Hobbs says: -

" So far as I am concerned in the above account, written by my wife, Jane Ann Hobbs, I declare it to be quite correct.

"William Ayers Hobbs".

The following account is from the son, who is a Baptist minister at Tenbury.

" July 29th, 1884.

"I remember that I had a sharp, short struggle for breath, accompanied by a bursting sensation in the head and singing in the ears; then I rolled over; the pain in the head was succeeded by a drowsy, dreamy feeling; a mist gathered before my eyes, and I was just on the point of losing consciousness, when the persistent thumps, which were being administered to my back by the anxious spectators, jerked the beef out of my throat, and I revived. I had no direct thought of my mother, as I imagine, for this reason: I was left in the care of an aunt, when my parents went to India; and as the whole of my training since I was four years old had been undertaken by this aunt, prior to my going to Birmingham, it was to her that my thoughts reverted when I was choking; and I distinctly remember that the thought flashed through my mind, ' How ever will Aunt Maria write to India about this.' I quite believed I was dying.

"H. V. Hobbs".

[In conversation, Mr. Podmore ascertained that the family are in no way given to real or supposed "psychical " experiences].

Here the unusualness of the accident, and the uniqueness and emotional vividness of the dream may, we think, be safely accepted. The slight amount of discrepancy between the final sentences of the mother's and the son's account can hardly be held to affect the general trustworthiness of Mrs. Hobbs' narrative; and it will be noticed that the agent's account of his own thoughts harmonises specially well with the actual nature of the percipient's impression, which was that the news was conveyed to her by her sister - the very person on whom her son imagined that sad duty as devolving.

[No. 106, another dream of an accident to a son, is here omitted].