10,000 Dreams Interpreted

``What we call light is a sensation produced upon our optic nerve by the vibrations of ether, comprising between 400 and 756 trillions per second, undulations that are themselves very obscure.

``What we call heat is a sensation produced by vibrations between 350 and and{sic} 600 trillions.

``The sun lights up space, as much at midnight as at midday. Its temperature is nearly 270 degrees below zero.

``What we call sound is a sensation produced upon our auditory nerve by silent vibrations of the air, themselves comprising between 32,000 and 36,000 a second.

. . . . . .

``Very many scientific terms represent only results, not causes. ``The soul may be in the same case.

``The observations given in this work, the sensations, the impressions, the visions, things heard, etc., may indicate physical effects produced without the brain.

``Yes, no doubt, but it does not seem so.

``Let us examine one instance.

``Turn back to page 156.@@@

``A young woman, adored by her husband, dies at Moscow. Her father-in-law, at Pulkowo, near St. Petersburg, saw her that same hour by his side. She walked with him along the street; then she disappeared. Surprised, startled, and terrified, he telegraphed to his son, and learned both the sickness and the death of his daughter-in-law.

``We are absolutely obliged to admit that SOMETHING emanated from the dying woman and touched her father-in-law. This thing unknown may have been an ethereal movement, as in the case of light, and may have been only an effect, a product, a result; but this effect must have had a cause, and this cause evidently proceeded from the woman who was dying. Can the constitution of the brain explain this projection? I do not think that any anatomist or physiologist will give this question an affirmative answer. One feels that there is a force unknown, proceeding, not from our physical organization, but from that in us which can think.

``Take another example (see page 57).@@@

``A lady in her own house hears a voice singing. It is the voice of a friend now in a convent, and she faints, because she is sure it is the voice of the dead. At the same moment that friend does really die, twenty miles away from her.

``Does not this give us the impression that one soul holds communication with another?

``Here is another example (page 163):@@@

``The wife of a captain who has gone out to the Indian mutiny sees one night her husband standing before her with his hands pressed to his breast, and a look of suffering on his face. The agitation that she feels convinces her that he is either killed or badly wounded. It was November 14th. The War Office subsequently publishes his death as having taken place on November 15th. She endeavors to have the true date ascertained. The War Office was wrong. He died on the 14th.

``A child six years old stops in the middle of his play and cries out, frightened: ``Mamma, I have seen Mamma.'' At that moment his mother was dying far away from him (page 124).@@@

``A young girl at a ball stops short in the middle of a dance and cries, bursting into tears. `My father is dead; I have just seen him.' At that moment her father died. She did not even know he was ill.

``All these things present themselves to us as indicating not physiological operations of one brain acting on another, but psychic actions of spirit upon spirit. We feel that they indicate to us some power unknown.

``No doubt it is difficult to apportion what belongs to the spirit, the soul, and what belongs to the brain. We can only let ourselves be guided in our judgment and our appreciations by the same feeling that is created in us by the discussion of phenomena. This is how all science has been started. Well, and does not every one feel that we have here to do with manifestations from beings capable of thought, and not with material physiological facts only?

``This impression is superabundantly confirmed by investigation concerning the unknown faculties of the soul, when active in dreams and somnambulism.

``A brother learns the death of his young sister by a terrible nightmare.

``A young girl sees beforehand, in a dream, the man whom she will marry.

``A mother sees her child lying in a road, covered with blood.