“Illusions Hypnagogiques.” The Scar in the Moustache. Dream of the Future. The Coral Sprigs. Anglo-Saxon Indifference. A Celtic Dream. The Satin Slippers. Waking Dreams. The Dead Shopman. Dreams in Swoons.
Perhaps nothing, not even a ghost, is so staggering to the powers of belief as a well-authenticated dream which strikes the bull’s eye of facts not known to the dreamer nor capable of being guessed by him. If the events beheld in the dream are far away in space, or are remote in time past, the puzzle is difficult enough. But if the events are still in the future, perhaps no kind of explanation except a mere “fluke” can even be suggested. Say that I dream of an event occurring at a distance, and that I record or act on my dream before it is corroborated. Suppose, too, that the event is not one which could be guessed, like the death of an invalid or the result of a race or of an election. This would be odd enough, but the facts of which I dreamed must have been present in the minds of living people. Now, if there is such a thing as “mental telegraphy” or “telepathy,” 16 my mind, in dream, may have “tapped” the minds of the people who knew the facts. We may not believe in “mental telegraphy,” but we can imagine it as one of the unknown possibilities of nature. Again, if I dream of an unchronicled event in the past, and if a letter of some historical person is later discovered which confirms the accuracy of my dream, we can at least conceive (though we need not believe) that the intelligence was telegraphed to my dreaming mind from the mind of a dead actor in, or witness of the historical scene, for the facts are unknown to living man. But even these wild guesses cannot cover a dream which correctly reveals events of the future; events necessarily not known to any finite mind of the living or of the dead, and too full of detail for an explanation by aid of chance coincidence.
In face of these difficulties mankind has gone on believing in dreams of all three classes: dreams revealing the unknown present, the unknown past, and the unknown future. The judicious reasonably set them all aside as the results of fortuitous coincidence, or revived recollection, or of the illusions of a false memory, or of imposture, conscious or unconscious. However, the stories continue to be told, and our business is with the stories.
Taking, first, dreams of the unknown past, we find a large modern collection of these attributed to a lady named “Miss A-”. They were waking dreams representing obscure incidents of the past, and were later corroborated by records in books, newspapers and manuscripts. But as these books and papers existed, and were known to exist, before the occurrence of the visions, it is obvious that the matter of the visions may have been derived from the books and so forth, or at least, a sceptic will vastly prefer this explanation. What we need is a dream or vision of the unknown past, corroborated by a document not known to exist at the time when the vision took place and was recorded. Probably there is no such instance, but the following tale, picturesque in itself, has a kind of shadow of the only satisfactory sort of corroboration.
The author responsible for this yarn is Dr. Gregory, F.R.S., Professor of Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh. After studying for many years the real or alleged phenomena of what has been called mesmerism, or electro-biology, or hypnotism, Dr. Gregory published in 1851 his Letters to a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism.
Though a F.R.S. and a Professor of Chemistry, the Doctor had no more idea of what constitutes evidence than a baby. He actually mixed up the Tyrone with the Lyttelton ghost story! His legend of Queen Mary’s jewels is derived from (1) the note-book, or (2) a letter containing, or professing to contain, extracts from the note-book, of a Major Buckley, an Anglo-Indian officer. This gentleman used to “magnetise” or hypnotise people, some of whom became clairvoyant, as if possessed of eyes acting as “double-patent-million magnifiers,” permeated by X rays.
“What follows is transcribed,” says the Doctor, “from Major Buckley’s note-book.” We abridge the narrative. Major Buckley hypnotised a young officer, who, on November 15, 1845, fell into “a deeper state” of trance. Thence he awoke into a “clairvoyant” condition and said: —
QUEEN MARY’S JEWELS
“I have had a strange dream about your ring” (a “medallion” of Anthony and Cleopatra); “it is very valuable.”
Major Buckley said it was worth £60, and put the ring into his friend’s hand.
“It belonged to royalty.”
“In what country?”
“I see Mary, Queen of Scots. It was given to her by a man, a foreigner, with other things from Italy. It came from Naples. It is not in the old setting. She wore it only once. The person who gave it to her was a musician.”
The seer then “saw” the donor’s signature, “Rizzio”. But Rizzio spelled his name Riccio! The seer now copied on paper a writing which in his trance he saw on vellum. The design here engraved (p. 32) is only from a rough copy of the seer’s original drawing, which was made by Major Buckley.
“Here” (pointing to the middle) “I see a diamond cross.” The smallest stone was above the size of one of four carats. “It” (the cross) “was worn out of sight by Mary. The vellum has been shown in the House of Lords.” 17
“.. The ring was taken off Mary’s finger by a man in anger and jealousy: he threw it into the water. When he took it off, she was being carried in a kind of bed with curtains” (a litter).
Just before Rizzio’s murder Mary was enceinte, and might well be carried in a litter, though she usually rode.
The seer then had a view of Sizzle’s murder, which he had probably read about.
Three weeks later, in another trance, the seer finished his design of the vellum. The words
A
M
DE LA PART
probably stand for à Marie, de la part de —
The thistle heads and leaves in gold at the corners were a usual decoration of the period; compare the ceiling of the room in Edinburgh Castle where James VI. was born, four months after Rizzio’s murder. They also occur in documents. Dr. Gregory conjectures that so valuable a present as a diamond cross may have been made not by Rizzio, but through Rizzio by the Pope.
It did not seem good to the doctor to consult Mary’s lists of jewels, nor, if he had done so, would he have been any the wiser. In 1566, just before the birth of James VI., Mary had an inventory drawn up, and added the names of the persons to whom she bequeathed her treasures in case she died in child-bed. But this inventory, hidden among a mass of law-papers in the Record Office, was not discovered till 1854, nine years after the vision of 1845, and three after its publication by Dr. Gregory in 1851. Not till 1863 was the inventory of 1566, discovered in 1854, published for the Bannatyne Club by Dr. Joseph Robertson.
Turning to the inventory we read of a valuable present made by David Rizzio to Mary, a tortoise of rubies, which she kept till her death, for it appears in a list made after her execution at Fotheringay. The murdered David Rizzio left a brother Joseph. Him the queen made her secretary, and in her will of 1566 mentions him thus: —
“A Josef, pour porter à celui qui je luy ay dit, une emeraude emaille de blanc.
“A Josef, pour porter à celui qui je luy ai dit, dont il ranvoir quittance.
“Une bague garnye de vingt cinq diamens tant grands que petis.”
Now the diamond cross seen by the young officer in 1845 was set
What is now called “mental telegraphy” or “telepathy” is quite an old idea. Bacon calls it “sympathy” between two distant minds, sympathy so strong that one communicates with the other without using the recognised channels of the senses. Izaak Walton explains in the same way Dr. Donne’s vision, in Paris, of his wife and dead child. “If two lutes are strung to an exact harmony, and one is struck, the other sounds,” argues Walton. Two minds may be as harmoniously attuned and communicate each with each. Of course, in the case of the lutes there are actual vibrations, physical facts. But we know nothing of vibrations in the brain which can traverse space to another brain.
Many experiments have been made in consciously transferring thoughts or emotions from one mind to another. These are very liable to be vitiated by bad observation, collusion and other causes. Meanwhile, intercommunication between mind and mind without the aid of the recognised senses – a supposed process of “telepathy” – is a current explanation of the dreams in which knowledge is obtained that exists in the mind of another person, and of the delusion by virtue of which one person sees another who is perhaps dying, or in some other crisis, at a distance. The idea is popular. A poor Highland woman wrote to her son in Glasgow: “Don’t be thinking too much of us, or I shall be seeing you some evening in the byre”. This is a simple expression of the hypothesis of “telepathy” or “mental telegraphy”.
Perhaps among such papers as the
