An instructive dream.

— During the last illness we had in the month of April 1866, we were under the dominion of an almost continuous drowsiness and rapture; in those moments we constantly dreamed of insignificant things, to which we paid not the slightest attention. But on the night of April 24 the vision presented so peculiar a character that we were keenly impressed.

In a place that recalled nothing to our memory and that resembled a street, there was a gathering of individuals who were conversing; of that number, only a few were known to us in the dream, but without our being able to designate them by name. We were considering the crowd and trying to grasp the subject of the conversation when, suddenly, there appeared at the corner of a wall an inscription in small letters, brilliant as fire, which we strove to decipher. It was thus conceived: “We have discovered that the rubber rolled under the wheel covers a league in ten minutes, provided the road…” While we were searching for the end of the sentence, the inscription faded little by little and we awoke. Fearing to forget these singular words, we hastened to transcribe them.

What could be the meaning of this vision, which nothing whatsoever in our thoughts and our preoccupations could have provoked? Occupying ourselves neither with inventions nor with industrial research, this could not be a reflection of our ideas. Then, what could this rubber signify, which, rolled under a wheel, covered a league in ten minutes? Was it the revelation of some new property of that substance? Was it to be called upon to play a part in locomotion? Did they wish to put us on the path of a discovery? But then, why address ourselves, and not specialized men, in a position to make the necessary studies and experiments? And yet, the dream was too characteristic, too special, to be ranked among dreams of fantasy; it must have had an aim; which? That is what we sought in vain.

— During the day, having had occasion to consult Dr. Demeure about our health, we took the opportunity to ask him to tell us whether the dream presented anything serious. Here is what he answered:

“The numerous dreams that have besieged you in these last days are the result of the very suffering you are experiencing. Every time there is a weakening of the body, there is a tendency toward the disengagement of the Spirit; but when the body suffers, the disengagement does not operate in a regular and normal manner; the Spirit is incessantly called back to its post; hence a kind of struggle, of conflict between the material needs and the spiritual tendencies; hence, too, interruptions and mixtures that confound the images and transform them into bizarre assemblages devoid of meaning. The character of dreams is connected, more than one thinks, to the nature of the illness. It is a study to be made, and physicians will often find therein precious diagnoses, when they recognize the independent action of the Spirit and the important part it plays in the economy [in the organism]. If the state of the body reacts upon the Spirit, for its part the state of the Spirit influences health powerfully and, in certain cases, it is as useful to act upon the Spirit as upon the body. Now, the nature of dreams may often be an indication of the state of the Spirit. I repeat that it is a study to be made, neglected to this day by Science, which sees everywhere nothing but the action of matter and takes no account whatever of the spiritual element. “The dream you reveal to me, of which you have kept so distinct a remembrance, seems to me to belong to another category. It contains a remarkable fact worthy of attention; it was certainly motivated, but at present I could not give you a satisfactory explanation; I could only give you my personal opinion, of which I am not very sure. I shall take my information from a good source, and tomorrow I shall communicate to you what I have learned.”

— On the following day he gave us this explanation:

“What you saw in the dream that I undertook to explain to you is not one of those fantastic images provoked by illness; it is, really, a manifestation, not of disincarnate Spirits, but of incarnate Spirits. You know that in sleep we may meet with persons known or unknown, dead or living. It was this last case that occurred in that circumstance. Those you saw are incarnate beings who, in isolation and without knowing one another, occupy themselves with inventions tending to perfect the means of locomotion, eliminating, as far as possible, the excess of expense caused by the wear of the materials in use today. Some thought of rubber, others of other materials; but what is peculiar is that they wished to draw your attention, as a subject of psychological study, to the gathering, in one and the same place, of the Spirits of various men pursuing the same aim. The discovery has no relation to Spiritism; it is only the conclave of inventors that they wished to show you, and the inscription had no other purpose than to specify, to your eyes, the principal object of their preoccupation, for there are some who seek other applications for rubber. Be persuaded that it is thus very often, and that when several men discover at the same time, whether a new law or a new body, at different points of the globe, their Spirits have studied the question together, during sleep, and, upon awakening, each works on his own side, drawing profit from the fruit of his observations. “Note well that here are ideas of incarnate beings, and that they prejudge nothing as to the merit of the discovery. It may be that from all these brains in ferment something useful comes forth, as it is possible that only chimeras come forth. Needless to say that it would be useless to interrogate the Spirits in this regard; their mission, as you have said in your works, is not to spare man the labor of research by bringing him finished inventions, which would be so many incitements to laziness and ignorance. In that great tournament of human intelligence, each one enters therein on his own account, and the victory belongs to the most skilled, the most persevering, the most courageous.”

— Question. What is to be thought of discoveries attributed to chance? Are some not the fruit of any research?

Answer. – You well know that chance does not exist; the things that seem to you the most fortuitous have their reason for being, for one must reckon with the innumerable hidden intelligences that preside over all the parts of the whole. If the moment for a discovery has come, its elements are divulged by those same intelligences; twenty men, a hundred men will pass beside it without noticing it; one alone will fix his attention. The fact, insignificant for the multitude, is for him a trail of light; to find it was not everything, the essential was to know how to employ it. It was not chance that placed it before his eyes, but the good Spirits who said to him: Look, observe, and profit, if you wish. Then he himself, in the moments of liberty of his Spirit, during the sleep of the body, may have been put on the path and, upon awakening, instinctively, directs himself to the place where he is to find the thing that, by his intelligence, he is called to bring to fruition. No; there is no chance: everything is intelligent in Nature.