Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily DeathMyers, F. W. H. (Frederic William Henry)
Religion
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
Myers, F. W. H. (Frederic William Henry)
Immortality; Parapsychology; Personality
II. It may include facts which have fallen within the sensory field, but
which have never been supraliminally "apperceived" or cognised in any
way. And thus also it may indicate that from this wider range of
remembered facts dream-_inferences_ have been drawn;--which inferences
may be _retrospective_, _prospective_, or,--if I may use a word of
Pope's with a new meaning, _circumspective_,--that is to say, relating
not to the past or to the future, but to the present condition of
matters beyond the range of ordinary perception. It is plain that
inferences of this kind (if they exist) will be liable to be mistaken
for direct retrocognition, direct premonition, direct clairvoyance;
while yet they need not actually prove anything more than a perception
on the part of the subliminal self more far-reaching,--a memory more
stable,--than is the perception or the memory of the supraliminal self
which we know.
These hypermnesic dreams, then, may afford a means of drawing our lines
of evidence more exactly; of relegating some marvellous narratives to a
realm of lesser marvel, and at the same time of realising more clearly
what it is in the most advanced cases which ordinary theories are really
powerless to explain.
As to the _first_ of the above-mentioned categories no one will raise
any doubt. It is a familiar fact--or a fact only sufficiently unfamiliar
to be noted with slight surprise--that we occasionally recover in sleep
a memory which has wholly dropped out of waking consciousness.
In such cases the original piece of knowledge has at the time made a
definite impress on the mind,--has come well within the span of
apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness. Its reappearance after
however long an interval is a fact to which there are already plenty of
parallels. But the conclusion to which some cases seem to me to point is
one of a much stranger character. I think that there is evidence to show
that many facts or pictures which have never even for a moment come
within the apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness are
nevertheless retained by the subliminal memory, and are occasionally
presented in dreams with what seems a definite purpose. I quote an
interesting case in Appendix IV. A.[47]
The same point, as we shall hereafter see, is illustrated by the
phenomena of crystal-vision. Miss Goodrich-Freer,[48] for example, saw
in the crystal the announcement of the death of a friend;--a piece of
news which certainly had never been apprehended by her ordinary
conscious self. On referring to the _Times_, it was found that an
announcement of the death of some one of the same unusual name was
contained in a sheet with which she had screened her face from the
fire;--so that the words may have fallen within her range of vision,
although they had not reached what we broadly call her waking mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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