But I shall begin by referring to a small group of cases,[140] which I admit to be anomalous and non-evidential--for we cannot prove that they were more than subjective experiences--yet which certainly should not be lost, filling as they do, in all their grotesqueness, a niche in our series otherwise as yet vacant. If man's spirit is separated at death from his organism, there must needs be cases where that separation, although apparently, is not really complete. There must be subjective sensations corresponding to the objective external facts of apparent death and subsequent resuscitation. Nor need it surprise those who may have followed my general argument, if those subjective sensations should prove to be dreamlike and fantastic. Here, as so often in our inquiries, the very oddity and unexpectedness of the details--the absence of that solemnity which one would think the dying man's own mind would have infused into the occasion--may point to the existence of some reality beneath the grotesque symbolism of the transitional dream. The transitional dream, I call it, for it seems to me not improbable--remote though such a view may be from current notions--that the passage from one state to another may sometimes be accompanied with some temporary lack of adjustment between experiences taking place in such different environments--between the systems of symbolism belonging to the one and to the other state. But the reason why I refer to the cases in this place is that here we have perhaps our nearest possible approach to the sensations of the spirit which is endeavouring to manifest itself;--an inside view of a would-be apparition. The narratives suggest, moreover, that spirits recently freed from the body may enjoy a fuller perception of earthly scenes than it is afterwards possible to retain, and that thus the predominance of apparitions of the _recently_ dead may be to some extent explained. We have, indeed, very few cases where actual apparitions give evidence of any _continuity_ in the knowledge possessed by a spirit of friends on earth. Such evidence is, naturally enough, more often furnished by automatic script or utterance. But there is one case (which I give in Appendix VII. A) where a spirit is recorded as appearing repeatedly--in guardian-angel fashion--and especially as foreseeing and sympathising with the survivor's future marriage.