He first demurs to an allowance of twelve hours for the coincidence of
hallucination and death; but, if we reflect that twelve hours is little
even in a year, coincidences within twelve hours, it may be admitted,
_donnent à penser_, even if we reject the theory that, granted a real
telepathic impact, it may need time and quiet for its development into a
complete hallucination. We need not linger over the very queer cases from
Munich, as these are not in the selected thirty of the Report. Herr Parish
then dwells on that _hallucination of memory_, in which we feel as if
everything that is going on had happened before. It may have occurred to
most of us to be reminded by some association of ideas during the day, of
some dream of the previous night, which we had forgotten. For instance,
looking at a brook from a bridge, and thinking of how I would fish it, I
remembered that I had dreamed, on the previous night, of casting a fly for
practice, on a lawn. Nobody would think of disputing the fact that I
really had such a dream, forgot it and remembered it when reminded of it
by association of ideas. But if the forgotten dream had been 'fulfilled,'
and been recalled to memory only in the moment of fulfilment, science
would deny that I ever had such a dream at all. The alleged dream would be
described as an 'hallucination of memory.' Something occurring, it would
be said, I had the not very unusual sensation, 'This has occurred to me
before,' and the sensation would become a false memory that it _had_
occurred--in a dream. This theory will be advanced, I think, not when an
ordinary dream is recalled by a waking experience, but only when the dream
coincides with and foreruns that experience, which is a thing that dreams
have no business to do. Such coincidental dreams are necessarily 'false
memories,' scientifically speaking. Now, how does this theory of false
memory bear on coincidental hallucinations?
The insane, it seems, are apt to have the false memory 'This occurred
before,' and _then_ to say that the event was revealed to them in a
vision.[2] The insane may be recommended to make a note of the vision, and
have it properly attested, _before_ the event. The same remark applies to
the 'presentiments' of the sane. But it does _not_ apply if Jones tells me
'I saw my great aunt last night,' and if news comes _after_ this remark
that Jones's aunt died, on that night, in Timbuctoo. Yet Herr Parish
(p. 282) seems to think that the argument of fallacious memory comes in
part, even when an hallucination has been reported to another person
_before_ its fulfilment. Of course all depends on the veracity of the
narrator and the person to whom he told his tale. To take a case given:[3]
Brown, say, travelling with his wife, dreams that a mad dog bit his boy at
home on the elbow. He tells his wife. Arriving at home Brown finds that it
was so. Herr Parish appears to argue thus:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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