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Psychical Research and Religion - G. N. M. Tyrrell

The Fountain Pens Case.

The percipient in this case, Miss I. Sollas, was personally known to Mrs. Salter, an officer of the Society for Psychical Research, and participant in the Cross-Correspondences (q.v.). The dream occurred and was noted down in May, 1937, and was described to the Society in a letter dated 14th January, 1938, as follows:

"In this dream my father came holding out to me a handful of fountain pens. I could not understand what he wanted me to do with them. He went away to his room and came again bringing another handful and anxiously asking me to 'send them to the same address.'

I awoke puzzled and began to remember that shortly before the end [Miss Sollas's father had died on 20th October, 1936) he had given me a parcel of silver paper saying it was the collection of a lifetime and would I take it for him to the hospital. Did I know the address?

He said he would have taken it himself if he had known what address to take it to; was I sure I knew the address?

It seemed to me very odd at the time because the hospital is a place everyone knows, including himself.

Well, after some time, I was in his study and found a box with a label 'old fountain pens' containing a handful of them and thought this looked like something interesting. Later in another part of the room, I found another box similarly labelled and also containing a handful corresponding to the two handfuls of my dream. I asked a friend if she knew whether old fountain pens were ever collected for charities, and she said ‘Yes’, she had once seen an advertisement asking for them.

My father was interested in the experiment made by --was it Myers? - someone who left a document locked up for survivors to see if they could tell its contents after his death. I remember my father saying he should have thought some simpler device should have been thought of, and this seemed to me like his simpler version of that experiment."

In the dream, Miss Sollas's father went from his study to his bedroom to fetch the second handful of pens.   Actually one box of pens was found in his study and the other "in the remotest corner of a drawer in his chest of drawers" at the other end, the bedroom end, of the room which her father had used for both study and bedroom. Miss Sollas admits that she might possibly have seen the box at the study-end of the room before she had her dream without noticing it; but she is sure she can never have seen the other box till she found it after the dream. Again memory belonging to a deceased person is strongly suggested, though not conclusively proved.