The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

All these kinds of things, in fact, are common in our visions between sleeping and waking (illusions hypnagogiques). The singularity is that they are seen by people wide awake in glass balls and so forth. Usually the seer is a person whose ordinary "mental imagery" is particularly vivid. But every "visualiser" is not a crystal seer. A novelist of my acquaintance can "visualise" so well that, having forgotten an address and lost the letter on which it was written, he called up a mental picture of the letter, and so discovered the address. But this very popular writer can see no visions in a crystal ball. Another very popular novelist can see them; little dramas are acted out in the ball for his edification. {58} These things are as unfamiliar to men of science as Mr. Galton found ordinary mental imagery, pictures in memory, to be. Psychology may or may not include them in her province; they may or may not come to be studied as ordinary dreams are studied. But, like dreams, these crystal visions enter the domain of the ghostly only when they are veracious, and contribute information previously unknown as to past, present or future. There are plenty of stories to this effect. To begin with an easy, or comparatively easy, exercise in belief.