[Footnote 86: Two other examples are referred to in _Phantasms_, vol. i. p. 189, but in neither case is the evidence obtainable at first-hand.] [Footnote 87: Except, of course, in cases of rudimentary hallucinations, such as after-images and bright spots in the eyes and singing in the ears, which are caused by the physical condition of the external organ.] [Footnote 88: See case No. 51, later; and compare Mr. Galton's observations in his lecture at the Royal Institution on "The Just Perceptible Difference" (reported in the _Times_, January 30th, 1893). Mr. Galton found that the ideal auditory impressions called up by reading the printed substance of a lecture enabled him to hear the lecturer's voice at a greater distance than when he had not the printed text before him; the ideal appears to have supplemented the real impression, as, in the case given in the text, the real reinforced the ideal.] CHAPTER VIII. COINCIDENT DREAMS. Seeing that so large a part of our lives is spent in sleep, we should perhaps be warranted in looking amongst dreams for evidence of the transference of thought from one mind to another; especially as the quiescence and the absence of outward impressions characteristic of sleep are precisely the conditions indicated by our researches as favourable to such transmission. Nor do the actual results in this direction at all fall short of any reasonable expectation. Long before scientific attention was directed to the subject the coincidences reported between dreams and external events had won the special consideration of the superstitious, and had given to the dreamer of dreams high rank in the company of the prophets and soothsayers. And such coincidences appear to be not less frequent at the present time. My chief difficulty in writing this chapter has been the task of selection from the super-abundant material at hand, much of it accumulated within the last five or six years; and this material is itself the carefully-sifted residuum of a much larger mass of testimony, inferior, if at all, by slight and various degrees. But notwithstanding this great accumulation, it cannot be contended that the proof of telepathy derived from a consideration of dream coincidences is at all comparable in cogency with that furnished by impressions received during waking life. That some at least of the dreams quoted below owed their origin to ideas transmitted to the sleeper from another mind will no doubt be admitted as probable, but the probability depends perhaps not more on their intrinsic value than on the analogy of similar testimony from waking percipients. When (as in some of the cases to be given later, in Chapters X.-XIII.) a witness of integrity asserts that he saw in broad daylight a figure where no such figure was, resembling a friend, and coincident with that friend's death, we are justified in attaching great weight to the coincidence. But if the same witness had dreamt of the figure, instead of seeing