A Spirit who believes he is dreaming.

— On several occasions Spirits have been seen who still believe themselves alive, because their fluidic body seems to them as tangible as their material body. Here is one of them, in an uncommon position: not believing himself dead, he is conscious of his intangibility; but, since in life he was profoundly materialistic, in belief and in manner of living, he imagines that he is dreaming, and nothing that was said to him could tear him from his error, so persuaded is he that everything ends with the body. He was a man of much wit, a distinguished writer, whom we shall designate by the name of Louis. He was part of the group of notabilities who, last December, departed for the world of the Spirits. Some years ago he came to our home, where he witnessed various cases of mediumship; there he saw, above all, a somnambulist who gave him evident proofs of lucidity, in matters that were entirely personal to him, but not even for this was he convinced of the existence of a spiritual principle. At a session of Mr. Desliens' group, on December 22, he came spontaneously to communicate through one of the mediums, Mr. Leymarie, without anyone having thought of him. He had died eight days before. Here is what he had written:

“What a singular dream!… I feel myself dragged along by a whirlwind, whose direction I do not understand… Some friends, whom I believed dead, invited me for a stroll, and here we are, carried off. Where are we going? Look!… strange jest! To a Spiritist group!… Ah! what an amusing farce, to see those good people conscientiously gathered together!… I know one of those faces… Where did I see it! I do not know… (It was Mr. Desliens, who was present at the session mentioned above.) Perhaps at the home of that worthy Allan Kardec, who once wished to prove to me that I had a soul, by making me feel immortality with my own hands. But in vain did they appeal to the Spirits, to the souls: everything failed; as at those poorly prepared dinners, no dish served was any good. Nevertheless, I did not doubt the good faith of the high priest; I consider him an honest man, but a proud simpleton of so-called erraticity. “I have heard you, ladies and gentlemen, and I present to you my respectful compliments. You write, it seems to me, and your nimble hands will no doubt transcribe the thought of the invisibles!… innocent spectacle!… senseless dream of mine! Here is one who writes what I say to myself… But you are absolutely not amusing, nor are my friends either, who have compassionate countenances like yours. (The Spirits of those who had died before him, and whom he believes he sees in a dream.)

“Ah! it is certainly a strange mania of this brave French people! They were deprived at one stroke of education, of faith, of right, of the freedom to think and write, and this brave people throws itself into reveries, into dreams. This land of the Gauls sleeps awake, and it is marvelous to see it act!

“Yet here they are in search of an insoluble problem, condemned by Science, by thinkers, by workers!… they lack education… Ignorance is the law of Loyola widely applied… they have before them all liberties; they can reach all abuses, destroy them, in short become their own master, a virile, economical, serious, lawful master, etc., and, like little children, they lack a religion, a pope, a curate, the first communion, baptism, a guide for everything and forever. Rattles are wanting to these big children, and the Spiritist or spiritualist groups give them to them. “Ah! if there really were a grain of truth in your lucubrations! but there would be, for the materialist, matter for suicide!… Look! I lived amply; I despised the flesh, I roused it to revolt; I laughed at the duties of family, of friendship. Passionate, I used and abused all voluptuousness, and this with the conviction that I was obeying the attractions of matter, the only true law on your Earth, and this I shall repeat upon my awakening, with the same fury, the same ardor, the same skill. I will take from a friend, from a neighbor, his wife, his daughter, or his ward, it matters little, provided that, being plunged into the delights of matter, I render homage to that divinity, mistress of all human actions. “But, and what if I had deceived myself?… if I had let the truth pass by?… if, in reality, there were other previous lives and successive existences after death?… if the Spirit were a living, eternal, progressive personality, laughing at death, retempering itself in what we call trial?… then there would be a God of justice and of goodness?… I would be a wretch… and the materialist school, guilty of the crime of high treason against the nation, would have attempted to behead the truth, the reason!… I would be, or rather, we would be profound scoundrels, refined supposed liberals!… Oh! then if you were in possession of the truth, I would put a bullet through my brains upon awakening, as surely as my name is…”

— At the session of the Society of Paris, of January 8, the same Spirit comes to manifest again, not by writing, but by speech, making use of the body of Mr. Morin, in spontaneous somnambulism. He spoke for an hour, and it was one of the most curious scenes, because the medium assumed his pose, his gestures, his voice, his language, to the point of being easily recognized by those who had seen him. The conversation was carefully gathered and faithfully reproduced, but its length does not permit us to publish it. Moreover, it was nothing but the development of his thesis; to all the objections and questions put to him, he claimed to explain everything by the state of dreaming and, naturally, lost himself in a labyrinth of sophisms. He himself recalled the principal episodes of the session to which he had alluded in his written communication, and said: “I was quite right to say that everything had failed. Look, here is the proof. I had asked this question: Is there a God? Well then! all your pretended Spirits answered in the affirmative. You see that they were beside the truth and know it no more than you do.” One question, however, embarrassed him greatly, and so he constantly sought subterfuges to evade it. It was this: “The body through which you speak to us is not yours, because it is thin and yours was fat. Where is your true body? It is not here, for you are not in your own home. When one dreams, one is in one's bed. Go, then, and see in your bed whether your body is there, and tell us how you can be here without your body?” Losing patience at these repeated questions, to which he answered only with the words: “Bizarre effects of dreams,” he ended by saying: “I see well that you wished to awaken me. Leave me.” From then on he believes he is always dreaming.

— At another meeting, a Spirit gave the following communication on this phenomenon:

Here we have a substitution of person, a disguise. The Spirit receives liberty or falls into inaction. I say inaction, that is, the contemplation of what is going on. He is in the position of a man who momentarily lends his residence and watches the various scenes that are enacted there with the aid of his furniture. If he prefers to enjoy liberty, he can, unless he has an interest in remaining as a spectator.

It is not rare that a Spirit acts and speaks with the body of another; you must understand the possibility of this phenomenon, when you know that the Spirit can withdraw with his perispirit more or less far from his corporeal envelope. When the fact happens without any Spirit taking advantage of it to take the place, there is catalepsy. When a Spirit wishes to enter there in order to act and take for a moment his part in incarnation, he unites his perispirit to the sleeping body, awakens it by that contact, and gives movement to the machine. But the movements, the voice, are not the same, because the perispiritual fluids no longer affect the nervous system in the same manner as the true occupant. This occupation can never be definitive; for that, the absolute disaggregation of the first perispirit would be necessary, which would forcibly lead to death. It cannot even be of long duration, since the new perispirit, not having been united to that body since the latter's formation, has no roots in it; not having been molded by that body, it is not suited to the functioning of the organs; the intruding Spirit is not there in a normal position; he is hampered in his movements, which is why he leaves that borrowed garment as soon as he no longer needs it. As for the particular position of the Spirit in question, he did not come voluntarily into the body of which he made use in order to speak; he was drawn to it by the very Spirit of Morin, who wished to take pleasure in his embarrassment; the other, because he yielded to the secret desire to show himself, still and always, as a skeptic and a mocker, took advantage of the occasion that was offered to him. The somewhat ridiculous role that he played, in spite of himself so to speak, making use of sophisms to explain his position, is a kind of humiliation, whose bitterness he will feel upon awakening, and which will be profitable to him. Observation. – The awakening of this Spirit cannot fail to provoke instructive observations. As was seen, in life he was a sort of sensualist materialist; he would never have accepted Spiritism. Men of this category seek the consolations of life in material pleasures; they are not of the school of Büchner through study; but because this doctrine frees them from the constraint imposed by spirituality, it must, in their opinion, be correct. For them, Spiritism is not a benefit, but a constraint; there are no proofs that can triumph over their obstinacy; they repel them, less out of conviction than out of fear that they may be true. [Review of April.]

THE AWAKENING OF MR. LOUIS.

In the preceding number we published the account of the singular state of a Spirit who believed he was dreaming. At last he awakened, and announced it spontaneously, in the following communication:

(Society of Paris, February 12, 1869. – Medium: Mr. Leymarie.)

Decidedly, gentlemen, in spite of myself, I must open my eyes and my ears; I must listen and see. However much I deny it and declare that you are maniacs, very courageous, but very inclined to reveries, to illusions, I must, I confess, despite my own words, finally acknowledge that I am no longer dreaming. Concerning this, I am certain, completely certain. I come to your home every Friday, days of meeting, and, from hearing it repeated so often, I wished to know whether this famous dream would be prolonged indefinitely. The friend Jobard took it upon himself to enlighten me on the matter, and this with solid proofs. I no longer belong to the Earth; I am dead; I saw the mourning of my own, the grief of my friends, the satisfaction of a few envious ones, and now I come to see you. My body did not follow me; it is indeed there, in its corner, in the midst of human dung; and, with or without being called, today I come to you, no longer with spite, but with the desire and the conviction of enlightening myself. I discern perfectly; I see what I was; I traverse immense distances with Jobard: therefore I live; I conceive, I combine, I possess my will and my free will: thus, not everything dies. We were not, then, an intelligent aggregation of molecules, and all the psalmodies about the intelligence of matter were nothing but empty phrases without consistency. Ah! believe me, gentlemen, if my eyes are opening, if I glimpse a new truth, it is not without sufferings, without revolts, without bitter relapses!

It is, then, very true! The Spirit endures! An intelligent fluid, it can, without matter, live its own life, ethereal, according to your expression: semimaterial. At times, however, I ask myself whether the fantastic dream that I had for more than a month is not continuing with new, unheard-of vicissitudes; but the cold, impassive reasoning of Jobard forces my hand, and, when I resist, he laughs and delights in confounding me; quite content, he heaps upon me epigrams and merry sayings! However much I rebel and revolt, I must obey the truth. The Desnoyers of the Earth, the author of Jean-Paul Choppard, is still alive, and his ardent thought embraces other horizons. Formerly he was liberal and down-to-earth, whereas now he approaches and embraces unknown, marvelous problems; and, in the face of these new appreciations, gentlemen, have the kindness to pardon me my somewhat frivolous expressions, because, if I was not completely right, you too might well have been a little in error.

I wish to reflect, to recognize myself definitively, and if the result of my serious inquiries leads me to your ideas, I shall wait, but it will no longer be in order to put a bullet through my brains.

Until another time, gentlemen.

Louis Desnoyers. n

— The same Spirit gave the following communication spontaneously, on the occasion of the death of Lamartine.

(Society of Paris, March 5, 1869. – Medium: Mr. Leymarie.)

Yes, gentlemen, we die more or less forgotten; poor beings, we live trusting in the organs that transmit our thoughts. We want life with its exuberances, we make a multitude of projects. In this world our passage may have had its repercussion and, when the last hour comes, all those noises, all that little stir, our pride, our egoism, our labor, everything is swallowed up in the mass. It is a drop of water in the human ocean.

Lamartine was a great and noble spirit, chivalrous, enthusiastic, a true master in the full sense of the word, a pure diamond, well cut; he was beautiful, great; he had the gaze, he had the gesture of the predestined; he knew how to think, to write; he knew how to speak; he was an inspired one, a transformer!… A poet, he changed the impulse of literature, lending it his prodigious wings; a man, he governed a people, a revolution, and his hands withdrew pure from contact with power.

No one more than he was loved, esteemed, blessed, adored; and when the white hairs came, when discouragement seized the handsome old man, the fighter of the great days, he was no longer pardoned a single instant of faltering. France herself was faltering and slapped the poet, the great man; she wished to belittle him, that fighter of two revolutions, and forgetfulness, I repeat, seemed to bury that great and magnanimous figure! He is dead and quite dead, for I received him beyond the tomb, with all those who had appreciated and esteemed him, in spite of the ostracism, of which the youth of the schools made a weapon against him. He was transfigured, yes, gentlemen, by the grief of having seen those who had loved him so much refuse him the devotion that he, nevertheless, never knew how to refuse to others in other times, while the victors held out their hands to him. The poet had become a philosopher, and this thinker was ripening his sorrowful soul for the great trial. He saw more clearly; he had a presentiment of everything, everything that you hope for, gentlemen, and everything that I did not hope for.

More than he, I am a vanquished one; vanquished by death, vanquished in life by need, that inaccessible enemy that importunes us like a corrosive; and far more vanquished today, because I come to bow before the truth.

Ah! if for France a great truth shines forth today; if the France of '89, if the mother of so many vanished geniuses begins again to feel that one of her dearest sons, the good, the noble Lamartine, has vanished, today I feel that for him nothing is dead; his memory is everywhere; the sonorous waves of so many memories stir the world. He was immortal among you, but far more still among us, where he is truly transfigured. His Spirit shines forth, and God can receive the great unknown one. From now on Lamartine can embrace the vastest horizons and sing the grandiose hymns that his great heart had dreamed. He can prepare your future, my friends, and hasten with us the humanitarian stages. More than ever he will be able to see developing in you that ardent love for instruction, for progress, for liberty, and for association, which are the elements of the future. France is an initiator; she knows what she can do; she will will it, she will dare it, when her powerful mane has shaken off the anthill that lives at the expense of her virility and her greatness. Shall I be able, like him, to win my halo and to become resplendent with happiness, to see myself regenerated by your belief, whose greatness I now understand? For you God marked me out like a stray sheep; thank you, gentlemen. At the contact of the dead so lamented, I feel myself living, and soon I shall say with you in the same prayer: Death is glory; death is life.

Louis Desnoyers.

Observation. – A lady, a member of the Society, who knew Mr. Lamartine personally, and had been present at his last moments, had just said that, after his death, his physiognomy had literally transfigured itself, that it no longer had the decrepitude of old age. It is to this circumstance that the Spirit alluded.

[1]

[see Louis Desnoyers.]