Dreams and premonitions

Introduction

Dreams and premonitions are the most common of all psychic phenomena, but they are nevertheless but little understood. Modern psychology has accumulated an immense array of facts which very conclusively show that the consciousness of the human being is something vaster, deeper and altogether more remarkable than has generally been supposed. But just there the psychologists stop, on the very threshold of great discoveries. They are puzzled by the remarkable facts and are baffled in their attempts to co-relate them" and satisfactorily explain them.

The facts that have been collected and verified show that while some dreams are fantastic, contradictory and illogical, others are not only coherent and logical, but present a marvelous depth of wisdom which, when compared to ordinary human knowledge, seems almost like omniscience. They sometimes solve problems that are impossible of solution by the waking consciousness, and frequently actually forecast the future by accurately describing an event which has not yet occurred but which is to be. Thus people have dreamed of their approaching death, or of the death of others, stating exactly the nature of the accident that would cause it, and describing in detail the scenes of the coming tragedy. Yet again the impending event presented to the consciousness in the dream state may represent only the most trivial of circumtances. Sometimes dreams give warnings about dangers that are threatening but of which the waking consciousness is wholly oblivious. In other cases a dream has enabled one to become a rescuer and lifesaver in some approaching disaster. Occasionally in a dream accurate knowledge is obtained of some tragedy that is occurring at a distance, or of a crime that has been committed, while again missing people have been located and lost objects have been recovered through dreams.

The truth of these astounding facts is beyond all question. The problem is to explain the facts. Modern psychology talks rather vaguely of the subconscious mind and of the subliminal self, but this really explains nothing. We do not advance toward the understanding of a mystery simply by applying to it a new name. What is that thing called the subconscious, or the subliminal, and what are its powers and its limitations? Unless science can satisfactorily answer such questions it has done little indeed toward solving these psychological puzzles.

The most striking characteristic of the recent work of writers on dreams is the strong tendency toward a purely materialistic interpretation of the phenomena observed. Hampered by the wholly inadequate hypothesis that dreams are caused either by impressions made on the physical senses or by desires of the waking consciousness, they fill their pages with a discussion of the class of dreams that may thus be explained

INTRODUCTION and carefully avoid the dreams that are really worthy of investigation just because they present facts that no such hypothesis can dispose of. It is some cause for congratulation, however, that after devoting much space to a description of the dreams which illustrate the well-known fact that slight external stimuli often cause exaggerated brain impressions — as, for example, a drop of water on the face causing a dream of a violent rainstorm — these writers often devote a closing paragraph to the admission that neither physical nor mental causes are sufficient to account for the dreams that occasionally forecast the future. Now, it is precisely those occasional dreams which the materialistic hypothesis can not explain that it is important to understand, for they alone can give some clue to the real nature of human consciousness. We shall surely learn but little by going many times over the .beaten path of admitted facts while neglecting to look beyond to the unexplored fields so full of fascinating possibilities. The merest glance is sufficient to show that there are two distinct classes of dreams ; that one class constitutes a memory, on awakening, of something that is related to impressions made on the physical senses ; that the other class clearly has no such origin and that, instead of being distorted and fantastic, such dreams sometimes embody profound wisdom or accurate knowledge of future events. These two classes of dreams no more arise from the same causes than the noise made by the revolving record of a phonograph has the same origin as the song of intelligence and emotion that flows from it. The one is purely mechanical, while the other is purely mental and spiritual, transmitted through a material mechanism. And that is the true distincton between the dream arising from a physical cause and the dream which owes its origin to the higher activities of unfettered consciousness. The one is produced by the mechanism of consciousness — the physical brain and its etheric counterpart — automatically responding to external stimuli and putting together fragmentary brain pictures. The other is the result of the activity of the ego impressing the physical brain with transcendental truth.

Psychologists should not be slower than the most progressive of physical scientists in accepting the fact of clairvoyance and recognizing the part it plays in occult research. There is so much of reliable evidence on record involving the use of clairvoyance that it would be almost as much a waste of time to argue its existence as to contend that there is a state of consciousness known as trance. Those who are familiar with the clairvoyant faculty and with the remarkable powers of the scientifically trained clairvoyant, will need no argument to convince them that here is a means of ascertaining the truth about the various states of consciousness and their relationship to the physical mechanism through which they are expressed. But it is of secondary importance whether the reality of clairvoyance be admitted or denied; for from the phenomena clairvoyantly observed and catalogued it is possible to construct the hypothesis that will explain the facts, and all of the known facts, related to dreams. Any hypothesis that can do that,

INTRODUCTION legitimately holds its place, and must be regarded as sound until a fact is produced that it can not explain. The method of acquiring the knowledge from which a hypothesis is constructed is of little importance. The only question to be considered is whether the hypothesis can explain the admitted facts. On its ability to do that it must stand or fall.

There is a working hypothesis that logically and satisfactorily explains all the remarkable facts, tragic or trivial, presented by dreams and premonitions ; that will enable us to classify and comprehend them; that will assign to each dream neither less nor more importance than the facts warrant, and that will give to those interested in the subject a key to these mysteries of the mind. The purpose of the following chapters is to present this hypothesis, together with the necessary facts to fully illustrate the psychic principles involved in the remarkable dreams herein recorded.

Chapter I

Before we can hope to comprehend dreams we must understand the nature and constitution of the dreamer. We must free ourselves of some of our materialistic conceptions and consider the question of what the human being really is. It is the popular error of regarding man as being nothing more than a physical body and brain that has so sadly retarded progress in this field of research. The very phenomena with which psychology deals should long ago have destroyed such an untenable premise, for by that materialistic hypothesis it is utterly impossible to account for the facts in hand.

The work of such scientists as Crookes and Lodge and Richet has finally turned public attention in the right direction. They have presented evidence in overwhelming abundance to show that the consciousness is not dependent on the physical body for its continuity; that after bodily death the consciousness survives, and that during the life of the physical body the consciousness may also function quite independently of it. So conclusive are the facts gathered by varied and long-continued experiments that Sir Oliver Lodge was led to declare in a lecture before the Society For The Advancement of Science that the. continent of a new world had been discovered, and that already a band of daring investigators had landed on its treacherous but promising shores.

This new ''continent" belongs, of course, to the invisible world, and these pioneers of the scientific army are not the first to explore it. They are only the vanguard of the physical scientists. The occult scientists were long ahead of them, and had explored and studied the invisible realms. Naturally enough they hail the advent of the physical scientists with the greatest satisfaction, for they are rapidly confirming what the occultists long have taught about the constitution of man.

It is only when we have fully before us these facts about the real nature of man, and understand that he is essentially a spiritual being, a minor part only of whose energies come into action in the material realms, that we shall be able to comprehend the phenomena of dreams and premonitions. Let us turn our attention, then, to the occult side of the problem and examine the working hypothesis that satisfactorily explains the facts.

This hypothesis is that the human being is an individualized portion of the universal mind which, in turn, is but one expression of the Supreme Being; that man is "an image of God'' in the very literal sense of having potentially within him the attributes, the power and the wisdom of the deity to which he is thus so directly related; that his evolution is going forward in a world that has both its spiritual and physical regions; that he is essentially a soul ,or center of consciousness, functioning through a physical body which is but the temporary vehicle of the real man in the same sense that an automobile is one's vehicle, and that this material body — which is in reality but the clothing of the soul, as the glove is the clothing of the hand — is discarded at death without in any degree affecting the life and consciousness that has temporarily used it for gaining experience in the material realms. Man is, therefore, a soul possessing a material body that enables him to be conscious and active in the physical world. This hypothesis reverses the old materialistic conception completely. This is man's temporary life. He existed as an intelligence before he came down into these material regions through birth in a physical body, and when that body dies he resumes his relationship to his home plane, the spiritual world. But this spiritual world is not merely a realm of thought. It is a world of form and a life of activity, of deeper, wider knowledge than the physical, an ethereal world, but still a world of thought, of action and of enterprise. It is a world of tenuous matter, a huge globe, not distant in space but enclosing and interpenetrating our own as the ether, postulated by science, surrounds and interpenetrates all physical objects. It is sometimes called the astral world. This ethereal world as a whole naturally has its sub-divisions, but for the purpose of understanding the phenomena of dreams it is not necessary to introduce details. It is necessary, however, to comprehend the relationship between the physical and astral regions, and between the physical and astral portions of the mechanism of consciousness. The relationship of the former is that of a world within a world — the astral globe being composed of matter so tenuous that it encloses the physical globe, interpenetrates it throughout, and extends far beyond it in space. As a ball of fibrous matter might be immersed in liquid matter, saturated with it, and completely surrounded by it, so the physical globe is interpenetrated and enveloped by the matter of the astral world. The astral world, then, is not remote but is here in the midst of us, about us, through us and beyond us.

The relationship of the physical and astral bodies of a human being are of a like nature. The tenuous matter of the astral body is within and without the physical body, extending somewhat beyond it, and constituting an exact duplicate of it: Of course,; neither of these bodies is in any sense the man. Both are parts of the complex mechanism through which he manifests himself, and the astral body is a higher and fuller expression of the man than the physical body is. Indeed, the latter is merely the body of action. It is only the instrument of the man, which enables him to be present in the physical world, while the astral body is that with which he feels and through which thought and emotion are sent downward, or outward, into the physical body. The physical body has no part in the generation of thought. It is merely the means by which thought and emotion are expressed in the material world. Therefore, thought and emotion do not come to an end when the physical body is inactive on account of either sleep or death.

These two encasements of the real man — the physical and astral bodies — separate from each other under certain conditions, the latter being used as a vehicle of consciousness while the former is quiescent. A diver uses a boat and a diver's suit. Both are necessary for the work he is to do. But he may leave the boat and use only the diving suit for a time. The boat served the purpose of enabling him to go from point to point on the surface. The diving suit enables him to explore a region in which the boat is not available. Neither is the man. They are merely the mechanism that he uses. So it is with his visible and invisible bodies. The visible physical body may be discarded and the invisible astral body may then be used as the vehicle of the consciousness, or soul — the man himself — in the more ethereal regions.

But what are the conditions under which the consciousness withdraws from the physical body and functions through the astral body? One is sleep and the other is death. Sleep always indicates the separation of the visible from the invisible body. Whether the sleep is natural, or is induced by hypnotism or trance, it indicates the reparation of the bodies. There can be no such separation without sleep and no sleep without such separation. Sleep is simply the absence of the man from his physical body. That is why it is asleep. It is not being used by the man. His intelligence is not flowing through it. He is not there.

But how, then, it may be asked, does the breathing continue and the heart beat if the body is without its tenant? How does the worm entombed within the chrysalis become the butterfly? How do creatures below the line of intellect in the evolutionary scale live without thinking? Our physical bodies are not dependent upon our intellects. We do not consciously direct the beating of the heart nor the processes of digestion during the waking hours. The activities necessary to the life and well-being of the body go on until its death whether we think of them or do not, and whether the consciousness is functioning through the body or is withdrawn from it.

Death is the other cause of the separation of the astral body from the physical body, and the only difference between sleep and death is that in sleep the man withdraws his consciousness temporarily from the physical body and later returns to it. The act of withdrawing is what we call falling asleep. Returning is what we call awakening. The instant the consciousness is withdrawn the physical body is asleep. That is what sleep is — the separation of the astral body from the physical body. The soul, the real man, has temporarily laid down his instrument of activity in the visible world. It is then like a vacant house with drawn curtains until its absent tenant returns to it, and begins to send his consciousness through it. During his absence he has been using his astral body as his vehicle of consciousness, just as the diver temporarily abandoned his boat for his diving suit.

In death the consciousness has been withdrawn from the physical body for the last time. The absence is permanent. The body has worn out or has been injured beyond the possibility of repair. The soul, the real man, can not return to it because it no longer serves the purpose for which it came into existence. It is a worthless machine, worn out through long use, broken suddenly by violence or wasted slowly by disease, as the case may be. During all the temporary absences called sleep there was a magnetic connection between* the astral and physical bodies of the man. But when death comes the tie between the soul and the material bod)' is broken and there is no possibility of returning to it. And that is what death is — the severing of the bond between the visible and invisible bodies. The physical body is then dead and disintegration begins. But the real man, the individual consciousness, has not ceased to live. He has merely lost the instrument that connected him with the material world, and which enabled him to move about on it and be known to others there. He is physically dead because he has lost the physical body. He is not mentally and emotionally dead because he has not lost that part of his mechanism of consciousness which is the seat of^ thought and emotion. The physical body enabled him to express his life in the visible world but it was no more the man than a phonograph is the person who sings into it. If the phonograph is broken the only change to the singer is that he has lost the instrument of his expression, not his consciousness.

It may, at first thought, seem grotesque to speak of a man as possessing more than one body. Being to many an unaccustomed thought it may sound as bizarre as to say that a person may occupy two houses at one and the same time. But nevertheless the idea represents scientific accuracy. As a matter of fact we do live in two houses whenever we live in any house. Science asserts that every physical atom has its duplicate in etheric matter, by which it is surrounded and interpenetrated. Every building, every brick and board, has its counterpart in unseen matter. The immobile mountains, the flowing streams, the swaying tree-tops, the waving fields of grain, the placid lakes and the ocean tempest tossed, all have their exact counterparts in the invisible matter that reproduces the world in phantom form.

So much science is able to demonstrate and the very nature of this truth compels us to postulate still other and rarer grades of matter than the ether. It is the next rarer grade of invisible matter that the scientists almost brought within the catalog of ascertained facts by discovering the electron and proving that the atom is a minute universe in itself.

When we hold a pebble in the hand we do not see all of the pebble. It consists of its visible and invisible parts, and sight and touch can deal with but one of them. The trained clairvoyant would see what others see and also the grades of subtile matter surrounding it and interpenetrating it. Now, since this surrounding and interpenetrating relationship of seen and unseen matter is as true of one object as another, the physical body is no exception. Duplicating it exactly in form and feature is the tenuous matter of a rarer grade, surrounding and permeating it. The consciousness functions through these two bodies as one complex instrument, yet they are separable. An aeroplane is equipped for movement both on the ground and through the air. It may lose its wheels without losing its power to soar. It has merely lost that part of its mechanism that enabled it to operate in connection with the grosser element. So with man. When he loses his physical body it limits his field of activities but does not change the man himself nor impair his ability to function elsewhere.

The dreamer, then, is vastly more than a physical body with a mysterious brain. We are not dealing with a machine, a portiori of which "secretes thought as the liver secretes bile," as a scientist of a past generation ventured to guess, but with a spiritual being functioning through a material body containing a brain that is at once an instrument of thought and a limitation of consciousness; for if thought and emotion have a superphysical origin a large percentage of their original energy must be expended in attaining material expression. Therefore the dreamer, in his waking hours, is expressing but a faint reflection of his true consciousness, which is necessarily limited by its material media. As a fragment of the universal mind he- possesses within his unfettered self a wisdom wholly foreign to his physical existence. The home plane of his being is above the limitations of those conditions of consciousness which we know as time and space. He is temporarily blinded by matter while functioning through the material body. He identifies himself with it and loses conscious connection with his higher estate. But when he escapes the limitations of the physical body, either in sleep or in death, and begins to function through his astral body he is a stage nearer to reality and has, in some degree, a transcendental grasp of human affairs. In the case of sleep he returns, at the moment of awakening, from the higher state of consciousness to the lower level of physical plane consciousness and is again subjected to the limitations of the physical brain.

But the physical brain has its counterpart in astral matter and it is the astral form in which the consciousness, the real man, has been functioning during the hours of sleep. His experiences during that time have given rise to thoughts and emotions which are not impressed upon the physical brain because it has had no part in them. They have set up vibrations only in the subtiler portions of the mechanism of consciousness. Ordinarily upon the re-uniting of the astral and physical bodies the vibrations of the tenuous astral matter are not communicated to the matter of the physical brain and there is no memory of what has occurred during the period of slumber. Occasionally, however, there is a rare combination of physical, astral and mental, conditions that makes memory possible and the recollection is called a dream. But all memories of the sleeping hours are not recollections of astral events and it is only after some effort and experience that it becomes possible to distinguish between the memories which represent the adventures of the soul in the astral region and the brain pictures caused by the automatic activity of the physical brain, in which external stimuli sometimes play a most dramatic part. Nevertheless the two distant classes of dreams, those caused by automatic physiological activity, occasionally associated with excitation outside the body, and those which represent the experiences of the man himself in the ethereal realms, are, as analysis will show, as different in their characteristics as are the causes which produce them.

CHAPTER II The Materialistic Hypothesis Is Inadequate

Some modern writers have labored mightily to show that dreams may be explained by a purely materialistic hypothesis. Coincidence has been put under such stress as to raise the accidental to the dignity of the causal. Telepathy has been relied upon to cover a multitude of lame conclusions. To explain strange facts we have been given far-fetched solutions that require more credulity for their acceptance than any fairy tale of our childhood days. A writer will cheerfully set out to give a satisfactory material solution for any and all dreams and will explain that the reason why a certain lady dreamed of the correct number of an unknown address was possibly because she had seen that particular number on the paging of a book the day before ! Another relates the story of a dinner party being interrupted by one of their number being suddenly impressed with the feeling that he must go immediately to a barn not far away; that an undefinable "something" was wrong there. He had no idea what it might be but he had an inner impulsion with the barn as a destination. It was an unreasonable but irresistible impulse to go immediately to examine the barn, and apparently for no reason at all. None of the others shared the feeling but upon reaching the barn they were astonished to find that a small blaze had started in some unknown way and there would have been a conflagration but for their timely arrival.

Here we have a phenomenon not easily explained. But it does not trouble the writer who presents it in order to show how simple it all is. "He smelled the smoke !" triumphantly exclaims this Sherlock Holmes of psychic riddles. And when, in such a case, it is shown that the feeling of anxiety positively antedated the starting of the blaze by some minutes he falls back on the final resort of the "subconscious self," quite overlooking the fact that that is begging the question and really explains nothing.

In one of the leading monthly periodicals a well-known psychologist for a time conducted a department on psychology and the announced purpose was to explain away puzzling psychic experiences in daily affairs. The thoughtful reader will find it difficult to believe that the people who propounded the questions were satisfied with the answers but they are apparently the best that modern psychology is prepared to give them. However, if the "solutions" serve no other purpose they are at least useful in illustrating the trivial arguments presented and the astounding conclusions reached.

It was not so long ago that the fact of telepathy was struggling for slight recognition and was knocking almost unheard at the door of modern psychology. Slowly its status changed from the condition of an outcast to tardy recognition of its usefulness, and the rapidly accumulating mass of psychic facts is likely to raise it soon to the importance of becoming the last hope of the ultra-materialist. Our psychologist of the periodical above mentioned had not proceeded far with his department until he opened his monthly digest with this declaration :

u In the many letters received by me since I began to discuss psychical problems in these columns, one fact has been increasingly evident — the actuality of telepathy or thought transference. Even if I had started with a disbelief in telepathy — which I assuredly did not — I could not have retained my skepticism after studying the letters my readers have sent me.

"From every State in the Union, from Canada, England, France, and other European countries, has come evidence, testifying with cumulative force that in some mysterious way one mind can in truth communicate directly with another mind, though half the world apart."

Without the fact of telepathy the attempt of the psychologist to explain some of the dreams submitted would, indeed, put him in hard case ; for even with telepathy, and telepathy strained and twisted out of all semblance to its legitimate self, his hypothesis is still hopelessly weak and utterly inadequate.

Telepathy — the communication between mind and mind without material means — has been demonstrated by the simple method of one person acting as the ''sender" and being handed a written word or a simple drawing upon a piece of paper supplied by the experimenter, who has himself at that moment conceived it. The ''sender" fixes his attention upon it. At that moment another person who is acting as the "receiver," stationed at a distance of, let us say, a hundred miles, waiting with pencil in hand, reproduces the word or drawing with more or less accuracy as the case ma}^ be. By the hypothesis laid down in Chapter I the explanation is as simple as wireless telegraphy. Thought is a force as certainly as electricity is a force. When a mental picture is formed in the mind, grades of subtile matter rarer than that of the brain are thrown into vibration and reproduce themselves in the mind of the "receiver" after the fashion of the vibrations initiated by the sending instrument of wireless telegraphy. But telepathy has its limitations as certainly as telegraphy has. A thought, a feeling, a mood, an emotion may be telepathically communicated from one person to another and apparently regardless of any intervening space which the limits of the earth can impose. In the case of people with minds well developed and capable of forming strong and clear mental images a more extended communication would conceivably be possible. The scientific experiments thus far made have, however, resulted in no such accomplishment.

The most that can be said to be proved for telepathy is that communication is a truth of nature and that it may occur in cases where, although the parties are widely separated, there is either strong effort to communicate or where there is a bond of sympathy between them. When people are together and their minds are running along the same lines it may occur under the most ordinary circumstances. But we must not overlook the part played by facial expression in reading the thoughts of others, nor of the physical conditions that shape thought in a common mold as, for example, when your friend rises to open a window before you can utter the request that is in your mind. He may have thought of it because he was moved by your thought or only because he, too, was uncomfortable. There are other cases not at all susceptible to such explanation. One often gets telepathically the thought of another who is near him but it is partial and fragmentary. He does not get a complete inventory of the content of the other's mind. So far as casual experience and scientific experiment have gone it has been made fairly clear that while telepathy is common it marks out an extremely narrow -field in psychological phenomena. Deprived of the connecting link of personal presence and conversation, or ties of close sympathy, it seems to be effective only when the thought is stimulated by some powerful emotion like sudden and serious illness, accident or death. When we go beyond that we are in the realm of assumption and speculation. To assume that because one mind can catchy a thought or emotion from another telepathically, one person therefore gets from another's mind without effort or desire all the details relating to something that individual has seen or heard, is as absurd as to assume that because wireless telegraphy brings a message that has pessed through the mind of the sending operator the message might in some mysterious way give a knowledge of everything else known to that individual. And yet just such fantastic and groundless assumption is what our psychologist is forced to, in the effort to explain some of the cases submitted. Here is an example :