“Somewhere about the year 1848 I went up from Oxford to stay a day or two with my brother.... When I got to his chambers I found a note on the table apologising for his absence, and saying that he had gone to a dance somewhere in the West End, and intended to be home soon after one o’clock. Instead of going to bed, I dozed in an arm-chair, but started up wide awake exactly at one, ejaculating, ‘By Jove, he’s down!’ and seeing him come out of a drawing-room into a brightly illuminated landing, catching his foot in the edge of the top stair, and falling headlong, just saving himself by his elbows and hands. (The house was one which I had never seen, nor did I know where it was.) Thinking very little of the matter, I fell a-doze again for half an hour, and was awakened by my brother suddenly coming in and saying, ‘Oh, there you are! I have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck as I ever had in my life. Coming out of the ball-room, I caught my foot, and tumbled full length down the stairs.’” An incident of this character might very properly be ranked as a mere coincidence, were it not for the fact that it is one only of a considerable number of well attested acts of vision connected either with the hypnagogic state or with the act of dreaming itself. The comparative rarity of such events lends them a marvelous aspect; yet there is really nothing about them any more wonderful or preternatural than the demonstrated possibility of telegraphic signaling across the sea without the intervention of an electric wire.[67] Under ordinary circumstances a metallic conductor must serve as the avenue of communication between distant stations; but if a sufficiently sensitive piece of apparatus be placed in contact with the water on either side of an arm of the sea, communications may be transmitted from one to the other by a diffusion of impulses through the entire body of water.