The Argosy — page 358: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

342 The Dreams of One’s Own Friends. questions one would like to ask. Would this lady have had this dream at all had she and her husband persisted in their original plan for the holiday? Or did she catch this baleful breath from the Future, by getting as it were on the frack of the coming events ? Beit noted, also, that in the strictest sense, this dream was symbolic, for the mere journey as a widow was not made by sea; nor was the journey itself actually taken in the company of the young friend whose subsequent filial faithfulness left no doubt of his being the guardian companion it had shadowed forth. The dreamer always declares that no one but herself and her husband could ever fully realise how impossible it seemed, at the date of her dream, that any future life of hers, as wife or widow, could ever be settled in the place they were then about to visit. Every circumstance existing at the time pointed in an opposite direction. It is evident, too, that she did not in their new acquaint- ance recognise the figure of her dream. If she had she would have shrunk from him in terror! Her utter forgetfulness of the dream also proves that she did not consciously “work it out.” In what can such a dream as this originate? Thought transference? Then from what mind? It could be only from some disembodied mind that could itself see into the future! And this is not a theory to be lightly entertained. Again, it makes us wonder, shrinkingly, how much there may be in the old stern theories of Fate—of a line laid down for our lives, which they cannot evade or transgress, though there may still remain to us some freedom of behaving well or ill, wisely or foolishly, at each particular juncture. Perhaps it is not so horrible an idea after all. Only it is difficult to understand how the circumstances of our lives can be irrevocably fixed beforehand, without our actions and characters being also determined. And that is a doctrine to which the healthy human consciousness gives flat denial. Perhaps a careful study of well-authenticated instances of fulfilled “ presentt ment,” or “foresight,” alongside with other instances of “ insight,” or right reading of the unknown past, might bring us a little nearer to the daylight which must somewhere brighten on this dark avenue of perplexed philosophy. ECOMICOOOKS. CO i