He stopped the mechanism and pushed it on one side.
“And what’s the other?” asked Laurie, looking again at the shelf.
“Ah!”
The medium, with quite a different air, took down and set before him an object resembling a tiny heart-shaped table on three wheeled legs, perhaps four or five inches across. Through the center ran a pencil perpendicularly of which the point just touched the tablecloth on which the thing rested. Laurie looked at it, and glanced up.
“Yes, that’s planchette,” said the medium.
“For … for automatic writing?”
The other nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “The experimenter puts his fingers lightly upon that, and there’s a sheet of paper beneath. That is all.”
Laurie looked at him, half curiously. Then with a sudden movement he stood up.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you. But—”
“Please sit down, Mr. Baxter. … I know you haven’t come about that kind of thing. Will you kindly tell me what you have come about?”
He, too, sat down, and, without looking at the other, began slowly to fill his pipe again, with his strong capable fingers. Laurie stared at the process, unseeing.
“Just tell me simply,” said the medium again, still without looking at him.
Laurie threw himself back.
“Well, I will,” he said. “I know it’s absurdly childish; but I’m a little frightened. It’s about a dream.”
“That’s not necessarily childish.”
“It’s a dream I had tonight—in my chair after dinner.”
“Well?”
Then Laurie began.
For about ten minutes he talked without ceasing. Mr. Vincent smoked tranquilly, putting what seemed to Laurie quite unimportant questions now and again, and nodding gently from time to time.
“And I’m frightened,” ended Laurie; “and I want you to tell me what it all means.”
The other drew a long inhalation through his pipe, expelled it, and leaned back.
“Oh, it’s comparatively common,” he said; “common, that is, with people of your temperament, Mr. Baxter—and mine. … You tell me that it was prayer that enabled you to get through at the end? That is interesting.”
“But—but—was it more than fancy—more, I mean, than an ordinary dream?”
“Oh, yes; it was objective. It was a real experience.”
“You mean—”
“Mr. Baxter, just listen to me for a minute or two. You can ask any questions you like at the end. First, you are a Catholic, you told me; you believe, that is to say, among other things, that the spiritual world is a real thing, always present more or less. Well, of course, I agree with you; though I do not agree with you altogether as to the geography and—and other details of that world. But you believe, I take it, that this world is continually with us—that this room, so to speak, is a great deal more than that of which our senses tell us that there are with us, now and always, a multitude of influences, good, bad, and indifferent, really present to our spirits?”
“I suppose so,” said Laurie.
“Now begin again. There are two kinds of dreams. (I am just stating my own belief, Mr. Baxter. You can make what comments you like afterwards.) The one kind of dream is entirely unimportant; it is merely a hash, a réchauffé, of our own thoughts, in which little things that we have experienced reappear in a hopeless sort of confusion. It is the kind of dream that we forget altogether, generally, five minutes after waking, if not before. But there is another kind of dream that we do not forget. It leaves as vivid an impression upon us as if it were a waking experience—an actual incident. And that is exactly what it is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Have you ever heard of the subliminal consciousness, Mr. Baxter?”
“No.”
The medium smiled.
“That is fortunate,” he said. “It’s being run to death just now. … Well, I’ll put it in an untechnical way. There is a part of us, is there not, that lies below our ordinary waking thoughts—that part of us in which our dreams reside, our habits take shape, our instincts, intuitions, and all the rest, are generated. Well, in ordinary dreams, when we are asleep, it is this part that is active. The pot boils, so to speak, all by itself, uncontrolled by reason. A madman is a man in whom this part is supreme in his waking life as well. Well, it is through this part of us that we communicate with the spiritual world. There are, let us say, two doors in it—that which leads up to our senses, through which come down our waking experiences to be stored up; and—and the other door. …”
“Yes?”
The medium hesitated.
“Well,” he said, “in some natures—yours, for instance, Mr. Baxter—this door opens rather easily. It was through that door that you went, I think, in what you call your ‘dream.’ You yourself said it was quite unlike ordinary dreams.”
“Yes.”
“And I am the more sure that this is so, since your experience is exactly that of so many others under the same circumstances.”
Laurie moved uncomfortably in his chair.
“I don’t quite understand,” he said sharply. “You mean it was not a dream?”
“Certainly not. At least, not a dream in the ordinary sense. It was an actual experience.”
“But—but I was asleep.”
“Certainly. That is one of the usual conditions—an almost indispensable condition, in fact. The objective self—I mean the ordinary workaday faculties—was lulled; and your subjective self—call it what you like—but it is your real self, the essential self that survives death—this self, simply went through the inner door, and—and saw what was to be seen.”
Laurie looked at him intently. But there was a touch of apprehension in his face, too.
“You mean,” he said slowly, “that—that all I saw—the limitations of space, and so forth—that these were facts and not fancies?”
“Certainly. Doesn’t your theology hint at something of the kind?”
Laurie was silent. He had no idea of what his theology told him on the point.
“But why should I—I of all people—have such an experience?” he asked suddenly.
The medium smiled.
“Who can tell that?” he said. “Why should one man be an artist, and another not? It is a matter of temperament. You see you’ve begun to develop that temperament at
