Brown dreamed nothing at all, but he gets excited when he hears the bad
news at home; he thinks, by false memory, that he has a recollection of
it, he says to his wife, 'My dear, didn't I tell you, last night, I had
dreamed all this?' and his equally excited wife replies, 'True, my Brown,
you did, and I said it was only one of your dreams.' And both now believe
that the dream occurred. This is very plausible, is it not? only science
would not say anything about it if the dream had _not_ been fulfilled--if
Brown had remarked, 'Egad, my dear, seeing that horse reminds me that I
was dreaming last night of driving in a dog-cart.' For then Brown was not
excited.
None of this exquisite reasoning as to dreams applies to waking
hallucinations, reported before the alleged coincidence, unless we accept
a collective hallucination of memory in seer or seers, and also in the
persons to whom their story was told.
But, it is obvious, memory is apt to become mythopoeic, so far as to
exaggerate closeness of coincidence, and to add romantic details. We do
not need Herr Parish to tell us _that_; we meet the circumstance in all
narratives from memory, whatever the topic, even in Herr Parish's own
writings.
We must admit that the public, in ghostly, as in all narratives on all
topics, is given to 'fanciful addenda.' Therefore, as Herr Parish justly
remarks, we should 'maintain a very sceptical attitude to all accounts' of
veridical hallucinations. 'Not that we should dismiss them as old wives'
fables--an all too common method--or even doubt the narrator's good
faith.' We should treat them like tales of big fish that get away;
sometimes there is good corroborative evidence that they really were
big fish, sometimes not. We shall return to these false memories.
Was there a coincidence at all in the Society's cases printed in the
Census? Herr Parish thinks three of the selected twenty-six cases very
dubious. In one case is a _possible_ margin of four days, another
(wrongly numbered by the way) does not occur at all among the twenty-six.
In the third, Herr Parish is wrong in his statement.[4] This is a lovely
example of the sceptical slipshod, and, accompanied by the miscitation of
the second case, shows that inexactitude is not all on the side of the
seers. However the case is not very good, the two percipients fancying
that the date of the event was less remote than it really was. Unluckily
Herr Parish only criticises these three cases, how accurately we have
remarked. He had no room for more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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