But, in the drawings, the fragments were of different colours, so thata student working on the drawings would not guess them to be parts ofone cylinder. Professor Hilprecht, however, examined the two actualfragments in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople. They lay in twodistinct cases, but, when put together, fitted. When cut asunder ofold, in Babylon, the white vein of the stone showed on one fragment,the grey surface on the other.Professor Romaine Newbold, who publishes this dream, explains that theprofessor had unconsciously reasoned out his facts, the difference ofcolour in the two pieces of agate disappearing in the dream. Theprofessor had heard from Dr. Peters of the expedition, that a room hadbeen discovered with fragments of a wooden box and chips of agate andlapis lazuli. The sleeping mind "combined its information," reasonedrightly from it, and threw its own conclusions into a dramatic form,receiving the information from the lips of a priest of Nippur.Probably we do a good deal of reasoning in sleep. ProfessorHilprecht, in 1882-83, was working at a translation of an inscriptionwherein came Nabu--Kudurru--usur, rendered by Professor Delitzsch"Nebo protect my mortar-board". Professor Hilprecht accepted this,but woke one morning with his mind full of the thought that the wordsshould be rendered "Nebo protect my boundary," which "sounds a deallikelier," and is now accepted. I myself, when working at the MSS. ofthe exiled Stuarts, was puzzled by the scorched appearance of thepaper on which Prince Charlie's and the king's letters were oftenwritten and by the peculiarities of the ink. I woke one morning witha sudden flash of common-sense. Sympathetic ink had been used, andthe papers had been toasted or treated with acids. This I hadprobably reasoned out in sleep, and, had I dreamed, my mind might havedramatised the idea. Old Mr. Edgar, the king's secretary, might haveappeared and given me the explanation. Maury publishes tales in whicha forgotten fact was revealed to him in a dream from the lips of adream-character (Le Sommeil et les Reves, pp. 142-143. The curiousmay also consult, on all these things, The Philosophy of Mysticism, byKarl du Prel, translated by Mr. Massey. The Assyrian Priest is inProceedings, S.P.R., vol. xii., p. 14).On the same plane as the dreams which we have been examining is thewaking sensation of the deja vu."I have been here before,But when or how I cannot tell."Most of us know this feeling, all the circumstances in which we findourselves have already occurred, we have a prophecy of what willhappen next "on the tip of our tongues" (like a half-remembered name),and then the impression vanishes. Scott complains of sufferingthrough a whole dinner-party from this sensation, but he had written"copy" for fifty printed pages on that day, and his brain was breakingdown. Of course psychology has explanations. The scene _may_ havereally occurred before, or may be the result of a malady ofperception, or one hemisphere of the brain not working in absolutesimultaneousness with the other may produce a double impression, thefirst being followed by the second, so that we really have had twosuccessive impressions, of which one seems much more remote in timethan it really was. Or we may have dreamed something like the sceneand forgotten the dream, or we may actually, in some not understoodmanner, have had a "prevision" of what is now actual, as when Shelleyalmost fainted on coming to a place near Oxford which he had beheld ina dream.Of course, if this "prevision" could be verified in detail, we shouldcome very near to dreams of the future fulfilled. Such a thing--verification of a detail--led to the conversion of William Hone, thefree-thinker and Radical of the early century, who consequently becamea Christian and a pessimistic, clear-sighted Tory. This tale of thedeja vu, therefore, leads up to the marvellous narratives of dreamssimultaneous with, or prophetic of, events not capable of beingguessed or inferred, or of events lost in the historical past, but,later, recovered from documents.Of Hone's affair there are two versions. Both may be given, as theyare short. If they illustrate the deja vu, they also illustrate thefond discrepancies of all such narratives. {24}
