Two English ladies stayed
recently at Florence at the house of Mr. B. One of these ladies, Mrs. S,
dreamed that she was in some other house, in a place unknown to her, and that
she went into a room where she took the strange notion to upset the tables and
overthrow the chairs, producing a general disorder among the furniture, which
she accordingly did.
In the morning she told Mrs. J of
her dream, adding, moreover, it seemed strange that an otherwise reasonable
person could commit such foolish tricks in her dream. This dream repeated itself twice more on two
successive nights.
Soon afterwards these ladies returned
to London, where they visited their friends.
On one such occasion Miss S accompanied Miss J on a visit to a friend of
Miss J, a lady whom Miss S had not seen before.
They were ushered into a room to
await the entrance of that lady, and while there Miss S was very much surprised
to recognize that room as the one which she had seen in her dream, and in which
she had overturned the furniture.
After a few minutes waiting the
lady of the house entered, and Miss S was introduced to her; but when she beheld
her guest she started and grew pale, and, excusing herself under the pretence
of a sudden illness, retired to her room, accompanied by Miss J.
To this lady she told that on
three successive nights — the dates corresponding with those when Miss S had
these dreams — all the furniture in that room had been put in disorder by an apparition;
that upon hearing the noise she and some servants went to that room in the
third night; that they all saw the ghost; and that she, upon seeing Miss S, had
recognized her as that ghost which had overturned the furniture.
~ *
~
However interesting and amusing
such occurrences may be, accounts of them are of little value if they do not
serve to illustrate certain laws of nature, whose knowledge may be Useful to
us.
We all know that even the most
rational person may have very foolish dreams, and this for the obvious reason
that understanding and will are attributes of the spirit, which retires within
itself during the sleep of the personality, and leaves the dream body a helpless
victim to its own instincts.
But the important lesson which
such an experience teaches is that it corroborates the teachings of the ancient
Indian sage Sankaracharya concerning this state, and goes to show that the
dream body is of a material kind.
This again suggest the truth of a
theory taught by the sages of olden times, that all the bodies of which the organism
of man is composed are of the same substance, only differing from each other in
their degrees of density or rarefaction from the gross material body up to the
clarified body of the regenerated in spirit.
And, in addition to this, a study
of the dream bodies may prove that many of the foolish pranks played at
spiritualistic séances may be caused by the irrational part of the animal souls
of the dead.
This, however, does not
invalidate the theory that the dream body of a person may also act rationally
during sleep, and this theory is moreover supported by many facts.
The conclusion may therefore be
drawn that the states of the souls and conditions of consciousness during sleep
or after death may vary a great deal in different persons, and that some may be
able to think and act rationally, while others are only guided by their
instincts or possessed by some fixed idea; but it may also be possible that the
dream body of a person during sleep may be observed by some other invisible
entity, and this perhaps will explain the reason why persons in a state of
somnambulism may perform some strange feats, which they never could or would undertake
while they were in possession of their reasoning faculties.
(Occult Review, November 1906,
p.242-243)
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