Observations placeholder

It was a long time since I had any experiences of what might be described as a spiritual nature, such as the voice and the dreams of the earlier part of my voyage. But now, after I had been for several weeks at sea, something of the same sort occurred again.

I dreamed one night that I was floating in the air above the dark ocean: and I knew myself to be roughly a hundred miles to the N.N.E. of my boat's present position. There on the ocean, on the dark water below me, I saw a curious hull, which I took to be a derelict. As I looked at it the light increased, and I made it out to be a ship with a stumpy mast; and the Captain's bridge aft, resembling a hen-coop.

I woke up, and remembering my experience with the dream of the lighthouse I skinned my eyes for fear I might be about to run into something, but I could see nothing in the murky darkness, so I turned in again; for after all, if the dream was true, was not the derelict I had sighted some hundred miles away?

The next morning, as I took my first peep outside my berth, I saw about a mile ahead the very  duplicate of the ship I had dreamed about. She looked like a steamer, but there was no smoke coming from her stack. I wondered if she was in fact a derelict. But, no: she was moving: she crossed my course in a southerly direction. It was not till I drew closer that I was able to make her out to be a diesel-engined freighter, with a deck cargo of timber, bound for Samoa or New Zealand. I passed her within half a mile: but I doubt if she noticed me.

This dream was in its way just as remarkable as the one about the lighthouse: for never since that once had I dreamed again about sailing on the sea: never at all have I dreamed about a ship and never till that moment had I passed a ship of any kind on the high seas. In some ways indeed it was the more remarkable dream of the two. For the lighthouse dream might have been prompted by the imminence of danger: I was really close to the reef and lighthouse when I dreamed about them. But at the time I dreamed of this steamer she was far below the horizon and it was not until the next day that  our paths crossed.

If dreams like this mean that the soul wanders from the body, it is a curious fact that the soul  nevertheless remains clearly conscious of just where the body is at the time. I told you that in this  dream of the steamer I knew that I had left my body behind a hundred miles to the S.S.W.