Observations placeholder
A prophetic dream of the birth of a baby girl
Identifier
026694
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The Future and Beyond – H F Saltmarsh
From Proc., XI, 503:
Professor J. Thoulet was sharing rooms with a friend at Rivanazzaro, in Piedmont. The wife of this friend was then living at Toulon and was shortly expecting a baby.
ProfessorThoulet woke one night thinking that he had a telegram in his hand. He entered the room of his friend and woke him, crying out, 'You have just got a little girl, the telegram says,' and then began to read the telegram. Before he had completed doing so, it appeared to vanish from his hand and he realized that he had been dreaming. His friend made him write down the words which he had seemed to read and he made a sort of plan of the remainder, although he could not then remember any of the words in spite of the fact that he had read them in his dream.
Professor Thoulet left Rivanazzaro after two or three days and went to Turin; eight or ten days later he received a telegram from his friend as follows, 'come directly, you were right.'
He returned to Rivanazzaro and was shown a telegram which his friend had received; the beginning was exactly what he had written down and when he read the remaining words he remembered them as the same as those which he had seemed to read in the dream telegram.
The confinement had taken place ten days after the night of the dream. Professor Thoulet was personally known to Professor Charles Richet who vouches for the story.
It will be seen from a consideration of these cases that while the simpler instances can be fairly adequately accounted for by telepathy, in the more complex the telepathic hypothesis requires a good deal of stretching to make it cover the facts.
In Professor Thoulet's case for example, we have to assume that the sex of the child to be born was correctly guessed beforehand, also that the actual wording of the telegram was decided upon ten days before the event took place. Where we have to make additional unsupported assumptions in order to enable any hypothesis to cover the facts, the probability that that hypothesis is applicable rapidly diminishes as the number and intrinsic improbability of the assumptions increase.