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In this section, it will be necessary to relate, as briefly as possible, the regrettably dramatic and extremely misleading incidents referred to in the second paragraph of the first chapter (the reader will remember the assurance given therein). It will be noticed that the incidents in question mimicked to perfection many classical examples of alleged 'clairvoyance', 'astral-wandering', and 'messages from the dead or dying'. It will be understood that they are described merely for their illustrative worth, and because they form part of the 'narrative of the actual proceedings involved'. But, from one point of view, these occurrences had a value entirely unique. This was because I was not, as is usually the case in such matters, compelled to take them at second-hand from some 'clairvoyant' or 'medium'—with all the important points left out and a mass of misleading suggestion thrown in. For they happened, one and all, to myself.

The first incident provided a very fair example of what might easily have passed for 'clairvoyance'.

It occurred in 1898, when I was staying at an hotel in Sussex. I dreamed, one night, that I was having an argument with one of the waiters as to what was the correct time. I asserted that it was half-past four in the afternoon: he maintained that it was half-past four in the middle of the night. With the apparent illogicality peculiar to all dreams, I concluded that my watch must have stopped; and, on extracting that instrument from my waistcoat pocket, I saw, looking down on it, that this was precisely the case. It had stopped—with the hands at half-past four. With that I awoke.

The dream had been a peculiar one (in ways which have nothing to do with this book), and the net result of it all was that I lit a match to see whether the watch had really stopped. To my surprise it was not, as it usually is, by my bedside. I got out of bed, hunted round, and found it lying on the chest of drawers. Sure enough, it had stopped, and the hands stood at half-past four.

The solution seemed perfectly obvious. The watch must have stopped during the previous afternoon. I must have noticed this, forgotten it, and remembered it in my dream. Satisfied on that point, I rewound the instrument, but, not knowing the real time, I left the hands as they were.

On coming downstairs next morning, I made straight for the nearest clock, with the object of setting the watch right. For if, as I supposed, it had stopped during the previous afternoon, and had merely been rewound at some unknown hour of the night, it was likely to be out by several hours.^[1]

To my absolute amazement I found that the hands had lost only some two or three minutes—about the amount of time which had elapsed between my waking from the dream and re-winding the watch.

This suggested, of course, that the watch had stopped at the actual moment of the dream.^[2] The latter was probably brought about by my missing the accustomed ticking. But—how did I come to see, in that dream, that the hands stood, as they actually did, at half-past four?

If anyone else had told me such a tale I should probably have replied that he had dreamed the whole episode, from beginning to end, including the getting up and re-winding. But that was an answer I could not give to myself. I knew that I had been awake when I had risen and looked at the watch lying on the chest of drawers. Yet, what was the alternative? 'Clairvoyance'—seeing across space through darkness and closed eyelids? Even supposing that there existed unknown rays which could effect that sort of penetration, and then produce vision—which I did not believe—the watch had been lying at a level above that of my eyes. What sort of rays could these be which bent round corners?

From Sussex, I went to Sorrento, in Italy. Lying in bed there one morning, I awoke and fell to wondering what the time might be. I lacked energy to look at my watch, which lay outside the mosquito curtains, on a small table within reach, but out of sight when my head was on the pillow. It occurred to me to experiment with the object of ascertaining whether I could again see that watch in the apparently 'clairvoyant' fashion of the earlier experience. Closing my eyes, and concentrating my thoughts upon wondering what the time might be, I fell into one of those semi-dozes in which one is still aware of one's situation. A moment later I found myself looking at the watch. The vision I saw was binocular, upright, poised in space about a foot from my nose, illumined by ordinary daylight, and encircled by a thick, whitish mist which filled the remainder of the field of sight. The hour hand stood at exactly eight o'clock; the minute hand was wavering between the twelve and the one; the second hand was a formless blur. To look more intently would, I felt, wake me completely, so I made up my mind to treat the minute hand as one treats the needle of a prismatic compass, and to divide the arc of its swing. This gave the time as two and a half minutes past eight. That decided, I opened my eyes, reached out under the mosquito curtains, grabbed the watch, pulled it in, and held it up before me. I was wide awake, and—the hands stood at two and a half minutes past eight.

This time there seemed to be no way out. I was driven to the conclusion that I possessed some funny faculty of seeing—seeing through obstacles, across space, and round corners.

But I was wrong.

Then came an incident of an entirely different character.

In January, 1901, I was at Alassio, on the Italian Riviera, having been invalided home from the Boer War. I dreamed, one night, that I was at a place which I took to be Fashoda, a little way up the Nile from Khartoum. The dream was a perfectly ordinary one, and by no means vivid, except in one particular. This was the sudden appearance of three men coming from the South. They were marvellously ragged, dressed in khaki faded to the colour of sackcloth; and their faces under their dusty sun-helmets were burned almost black. They looked, in fact, exactly like soldiers of the column with which I had lately been trekking in South Africa, and such I took them to be. I was puzzled as to why they should have travelled all the way from that country to the Sudan, and I questioned them on that point. They assured me, however, that this was precisely what they had done. 'We have come right through from the Cape,' said one. Another added: 'I've had an awful time. I nearly died of yellow fever.'

The remainder of the dream was unimportant.

At that time we were receiving the Daily Telegraph regularly from England. On opening this paper at breakfast, the morning after the dream, my eye was caught by the following flaring headlines:

T H EC A P ET OC A I R O

'D A I L YT E L E G R A P H'

EXPEDITION AT KHARTOUM

From our special correspondent.

Khartoum, Thursday (5 p.m.).

The Daily Telegraph expedition has arrived at

Khartoum after a magnificent journey, etc., etc.

A note in another part of the paper stated that the expedition was led by M. Lionel Decle.^[3] I heard or read subsequently that one of the three white men of the party had died en route; not, however, of yellow fever, but of enteric. Whether this was true, or whether there were three white leaders, I do not know.

One or two remarks may be made here.

I had heard, some years previously, that M. Lionel Decle was contemplating some such trans-continental journey; but I did not know that anything had come of the scheme. Certainly I had no idea that the expedition had started.

The expedition arrived at Khartoum the day before the news was published in London, and thus long before I had the dream, as that issue of the paper had to get from London to Alassio, and the dream did not occur till the night before its arrival. This put any 'astral-wandering' business completely out of the question.

I attempted no explanation.

The next incident was as dramatic as any lover of the marvellous could desire.

In the spring of 1902 I was encamped with the 6th Mounted Infantry near the ruins of Lindley, in the (then) Orange Free State. We had just come off trek, and mails and newspapers arrived but rarely.

There, one night, I had an unusually vivid and rather unpleasant dream.

I seemed to be standing on high ground—the upper slopes of some spur of a hill or mountain. The ground was of a curious white formation. Here and there in this were little fissures, and from these jets of vapour were spouting upward. In my dream I recognized the place as an island of which I had dreamed before—an island which was in imminent peril from a volcano. And, when I saw the vapour spouting from the ground, I gasped: 'It's the island! Good Lord, the whole thing is going to blow up!' For I had memories of reading about Krakatoa, where the sea, making its way into the heart of a volcano through a submarine crevice, flushed into steam, and blew the whole mountain to pieces. Forthwith I was seized with a frantic desire to save the four thousand (I knew the number) unsuspecting inhabitants. Obviously there was only one way of doing this, and that was to take them off in ships. There followed a most distressing nightmare, in which I was at a neighbouring island, trying to get the incredulous French authorities to despatch vessels of every and any description to remove the inhabitants of the threatened island. I was sent from one official to another; and finally woke myself by my own dream exertions, clinging to the heads of a team of horses drawing the carriage of one 'Monsieur le Maire', who was going out to dine and wanted me to return when his office would be open next day. All through the dream the number of the people in danger obsessed my mind. I repeated it to everyone I met, and, at the moment of waking, I was shouting to the 'Maire', 'Listen! Four thousand people will be killed unless——'

I am not certain now when we received our next batch of papers, but, when they did come, the Daily Telegraph was amongst them, and, on opening the centre sheet, this is what met my eyes:

VOLCANO DISASTER

IN

MARTINIQUE

TOWN SWEPT AWAY

AN AVALANCHE OF FLAME

PROBABLE LOSS OF OVER

40,000 LIVES

BRITISH STEAMER BURNT

One of the most terrible disasters in the annals of the world has befallen the once prosperous town of St Pierre, the commercial capital of the French island of Martinique in the West Indies. At eight o'clock on Thursday morning the volcano Mont Pelée which had been quiescent for a century, etc., etc.

But there is no need to go over the story of the worst eruption in modern history.

In another column of the same paper was the following, the headlines being somewhat smaller:

A MOUNTAIN EXPLODES

There followed the report of the schooner Ocean Traveller, which had been obliged to leave St Vincent owing to a fall of sand from the volcano there, and had subsequently been unable to reach St Lucia owing to adverse currents opposite the ill-fated St Pierre. The paragraph contained these words:

'When she was about a mile off, the volcano Mont Pelée exploded.'

The narrator subsequently described how the mountain seemed to split open all down the side.

Needless to say, ships were busy for some time after, removing survivors to neighbouring islands.

There is one remark to be made here.

The number of people declared to be killed was not, as I had maintained throughout the dream, 4000, but 40,000. I was out by a nought. But, when I read the paper, I read, in my haste, that number as 4000; and, in telling the story subsequently, I always spoke of that printed figure as having been 4000; and I did not know it was really 40,000 until I copied out the paragraph fifteen years later.

Now, when the next batch of papers arrived, these gave more exact estimates of what the actual loss of life had been; and I discovered that the true figure had nothing in common with the arrangement of fours and noughts I had both dreamed of, and gathered from the first report. So my wonderful 'clairvoyant' vision had been wrong in its most insistent particular! But it was clear that its wrongness was likely to prove a matter just as important as its rightness. For whence, in the dream, had I got that idea of 4000? Clearly it must have come into my mind because of the newspaper paragraph. This suggested the extremely unpleasant notion that the whole thing was what doctors call 'Identifying Paramnesia'; that I had never really had any such dream at all; but that, on reading the newspaper report, a false idea had sprung up in my mind to the effect that I had previously dreamed a dream containing all the details given in that paragraph.

Moreover, reflection showed that the Cape to Cairo vision might very well have been of the same character.

Indeed, the more I thought of the two episodes the clearer it became that, in each case, the dream had been precisely the sort of thing I might have expected to have experienced after reading the printed report—a perfectly ordinary dream based upon the personal experience of reading. How, then, could I be sure that those dreams had not been false memories engendered by the act of reading?

But there was the watch business to be taken into account. That, certainly, could not be made to fit in with the new theory, unless I were a great deal madder than I could bring myself to believe.

I was, however, absolutely satisfied that neither in the Cape to Cairo nor in the Mont Pelée dream had there been any 'astral-wandering', or any direct vision across leagues of space, or any 'messages' from the actors in the actual episodes represented. These dreams had been induced, either by the reading of the paragraphs, or else by telepathic communications from the journalist in the Daily Telegraph office who had written those accounts.

[1]	In other words, it was extremely unlikely that I should have dreamed of half-past four at precisely half-past four. A correspondent, Mr C. G. Newland, points out that I should make this more clear since the question was essentially one of probability.

[2]	The improbability of my having dreamed of half-past four at half-past four must be multiplied by the improbability of my having been bothered by a stopped watch on the previous afternoon without retaining the faintest recollection of such a fact.

[3]	The reader should bear in mind that, in the era of which I write, African exploration was a subject of great interest to everyone. This was the first occasion on which the 'Dark Continent' had been crossed in this direction, and the event was 'news' of the first magnitude.