The beginning of things evades us; their end Evades us also. We see only the middle.

- Indian Poet.

We come now to a class of dream that has been ignored, evaded, sneered at, disbelieved in, and, finally, investigated and proved. It is a class of dream for which that convenient word "coincidence" is brought into use. If "coincidence" explains all cases of premonition, there is only this to say, that the explanation is far more wonderful than that which it explains. The man who argues thus must take one of three lines:1 "He must either (1) maintain that the alleged coincidences are misrepresented as such to a much larger extent than we have allowed for, or (2) that they have been sought after by the collectors, and illegitimately introduced into the collection to a much larger extent in proportion to non-coincidental cases than we have allowed for, or (3) admitting that the coincidences really exist in a proportion sufficient to prove a causal connection between the apparition and the death of the person seen, he may maintain that this connection is not telepathic, but consists in a condition favourable to hallucination being produced in the percipient in some normal way by the circumstances of the case.

1 Vol. x., part xxvi. of Proceedings S. P. R.

"The first of these lines of argument can only be met by reference to the evidence on which each case rests. This in twenty-six - or in fact thirty-one - cases is before the reader, and he must form his own estimate. We need only point out here that" the evidence must break down in a wholesale way in order to destroy our argument. For the margin on the side against chance is very large, even one death-coincidence being more than we should be justified in expecting chance to produce in a collection ten times the size of ours.

"As to the second line of argument, we have only to remind the reader that in twenty-six of the death - coincidences, of which sixteen are printed in the last chapter, our collectors report that they had no previous knowledge of the percipient's experience. We may add that in eleven of these cases - of which eight, viz., Nos. 425, 12, 442, 17, 381.4, 383.24, 379.24, 61.22, 452.10 (two cases), are among the twenty - seven printed in the last chapter - we have, besides the marking of the returns in accordance with our instructions, the positive statement of the collector, confirmed in most cases by circumstances mentioned by him when questioned, that he did not know of the experience when the question was put to the percipient. The number of these cases is alone sufficient to destroy the argument for chance coincidence, and as stated on p. 210, we have strong ground for believing that in some of the cases in which it is known that the collector was aware of the experience, this knowledge had no influence on his selection of the informant"

Thus the Society for Psychical Research, which takes the very greatest pains to investigate and verify all instances brought to its notice, and discards all accounts that do not bear the closest scrutiny.

The question seems to rest on a very simple basis: Do we or do we not believe in an after life? If we do, who are we to fix the limitations to what God permits our spirit to do after it has slipped from our earthly body? "You cannot measure the miraculous by the amount of a fool's intellect, nor squeeze God into a test tube."

It is but a poor intellect that is bound down to its own limited horizon. We are all intensely amused at Mr. Kruger because he is absolutely convinced that the world is flat. How do we know that it is not so? Mr. Kruger believes it is flat because he does not believe other people who tell him that it is round Are not those who disbelieve everything that they have not seen themselves in exactly the same position as Mr. Kruger relatively to the world's form?

Taking the phenomena of premonition in dreams, for example, it is an undoubted fact that many reliable persons have had these dreams, have told others about them, and written them down before the fulfilment of the prophecy. Are we to disbelieve their evidence because the event did not happen to us personally? Do we not believe in many things of which we have not any personal knowledge?

In Mr. Myers'lecture on "The Subliminal Self" the following beautiful passage occurred:-

"If then all these phenomena form part of one great effort by which man's soul is striving to know his spiritual environment, and his spiritual environment is striving to become known, how little can it matter what the special incident foretold or foreshadowed may be! What signifies it whether this or that earthly peril be averted, or earthly benefit secured, whether through this or that petty channel shall flow some streams of mortal things? The prime need of man is to know more fully, that he may obey more unhesitatingly the laws of the world unseen. And how can this great end be attained save by the unfoldment from within, in whatsoever fashion it may be possible, of man's transcendental faculty; by his recognition of himself as a cosmic being and not a planetary, as not a body but a soul? Surely even that special premonition which is sometimes spoken of as a thing of terror - the warning or the promise of earthly death - should to the wise man sound as a friendly summons, and as a welcome home.

Let him remember the vision which came to Socrates in the prison - house; then, and then only, showing in an angel's similitude the Providence which till that hour had been but as an impersonal and invisible Voice. But now the 'fair and white - robed woman,' while friends offered escape from death, had already spoken of better hope than this, and has given to Achilles' words a more sacred meaning: 'On the third day hence thou comest to Phthia's fertile shore'."

It would indeed be well if man could realise that he is a soul as well as a body. I will proceed first to give some instances where an event or series of events of more or less importance have been prophesied in a dream. Some are of quite minor importance and are only given here as they are well authenticated, and serve a purpose, in that they show that the sleeping brain is capable on occasion of looking ahead.