But even these wild guesses cannot cover a
dream which correctly reveals events of the future; events necessarily
not known to any finite mind of the living or of the dead, and too
full of detail for an explanation by aid of chance coincidence.
In face of these difficulties mankind has gone on believing in dreams
of all three classes: dreams revealing the unknown present, the
unknown past, and the unknown future. The judicious reasonably set
them all aside as the results of fortuitous coincidence, or revived
recollection, or of the illusions of a false memory, or of imposture,
conscious or unconscious. However, the stories continue to be told,
and our business is with the stories.
Taking, first, dreams of the unknown past, we find a large modern
collection of these attributed to a lady named "Miss A---". They were
waking dreams representing obscure incidents of the past, and were
later corroborated by records in books, newspapers and manuscripts.
But as these books and papers existed, and were known to exist, before
the occurrence of the visions, it is obvious that the matter of the
visions _may_ have been derived from the books and so forth, or at
least, a sceptic will vastly prefer this explanation.
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