§ 7. The remaining head that we have to consider is expectancy. The evidence as to the power of this condition of mind to produce waking hallucinations is rather more definite than in the case of anxiety. Braid describes a lady who, as soon as the idea was suggested to her, saw coruscating flames issue from the poles of a magnet, or wherever she believed the influence of the magnet to extend; and in the dark, liability to this form of delusion seems not very uncommon. Crucial examples of a more developed type - except in crises of epidemic excitement (see pp. 477-8) - are less easy to find. I have one daylight case where a man who was searching for a tennis-ball had a distinct apparition of the missing object in a spot where it was not. And expectancy may probably be answerable for a good many apparitions seen in rooms believed to be "haunted." I select the following example, however, as free from all superstitious associations, and as almost certainly a hallucination, and not a mere illusion.

A barrister - whose name I am at liberty to mention, but not to print - writes to me: -

" December 21st, 1885.

" In October, 1885, I was stopping for the night at the Swan Hotel at B., on circuit. My bedroom was No. 17. My friend K., a brother barrister, occupied No. 16. Between No. 17 (my room) and No. 18 there was a communicating door, and before retiring to rest I was under the impression that the door was between my room and my friend K.'s. I had told my friend K. so, when bidding him good-night, and he had jokingly remarked that he would come in and frighten me during the night. I discovered before going to bed that our rooms did not communicate. I must have been asleep some hours, when I woke up with a sensation that someone was close to my bed, and feeling about the other side of the chintz curtain at the head of the bed. I could hear the rustling and crackling of the curtain close to my face. I felt perfectly unable to move, or protect myself - not through any fear, but from a want of power of movement.1 After a few seconds this powerlessness went off, and I sprang out of bed, and saw the figure of my friend K. retreating towards the foot of the bed.

He kept his face averted, his head a little bent, but I could see the wire and one of the glasses of his spectacles as he turned from me; he was dressed in his night-shirt. And what made me believe in the reality of the appearance was the * solidity ' of the white nightdress, and the light on the spectacles. The room was in dim light, owing to gas-lamps in street, and a fanlight over door admitting light from gas in passage. I grasped at my friend with both hands and supposed I had missed him as my hands met in the grasp. I attempted again to grasp him, when he disappeared as if through the floor under the washing-stand. I then realised, with some interest, that it was a hallucination, and I sat on the bed, wide awake, interested in thinking it over. I told K. of it next morning. I am uncertain whether there was a fan-light over the door, but such was my impression at the time; anyway, the room was light.

1 I have two other cases where a subjective hallucination seen on waking was accompanied by inability to speak or move. See also the telepathic case No. 210, below.

"T. H. L".

"K." sent me a completely concordant account a month earlier. He says that he never walked in his sleep, and adds: -

' I had no notion where L.'s room was that night, but afterwards found that it was separated from mine by a passage. I don't think the sleep-walking theory is possible; and he is quite clear as to my vanishing".