Preface : Part 2

Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted: Or What's In a Dream
by Gustavus Hindman Miller

(Page 2 of 23)

"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.

"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:

"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:

"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:

"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.

"A lady goes, in a dream, to visit her husband on a distant steamer, and her husband really receives this visit, which is seen by a third person.

"A magnetized lady sees and describes the interior of the body of her dying mother; what she said is confirmed by the autopsy.

"A gentleman sees, in a dream, a lady whom he knows arriving at night in a railroad station, her journey having been undertaken suddenly.

"A magistrate sees three years in advance the commission of a crime, down to its smallest details.

"Several persons report that they have seen towns and landscapes before they ever visited them, and have seen themselves in situations in which they found themselves long after.

"A mother hears her daughter announce her intended marriage six months before it has been thought of.

"Frequent cases of death are foretold with precision.

"A theft is seen by a somnambulist, and the execution of the criminal is foretold.

"A young girl sees her fiance', or an intimate friend dying (these are frequent cases), etc.

"All these show unknown faculties in the soul. Such at least is my own impression. It seems to me that we cannot reasonably attribute the prevision of the future and mental sight to a nervous action of the brain.

"I think we must either deny these facts or admit that they must have had an intellectual and spiritual cause of the psychic order, and I recommend sceptics who do not desire to be convinced, to deny them outright; to treat them as illusions and cases of a fortuitous coincidence of circumstances. They will find this easier. Uncompromising deniers of facts, rebels against evidence, may be all the more positive, and may declare that the writers of these extraordinary narratives are persons fond of a joke, who have written them to hoax me, and that there have been persons in all ages who have done the same thing to mystify thinkers who have taken up such questions.

G. W. Dillingham company, NY 1901