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: 

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.