Reply to Dr. David Brunswick's Comment

Dr. Brunswick's remarks about the paper he quotes seem to me very pertinent. A careful student should always think of any possible way of ruling out supposed 'paranormal' factors in a given occurrence, and see whether the facts could be not interpreted in a 'normal' fashion. This is, of course, what I have constantly tried to do (my general attitude is apparent in the very title of my paper), although perhaps such endeavours can never reach 100 per cent evidence.

Regarding the first point raised by Dr. Brunswick I can only say that my patient (who was, as it will be remembered, an obsessional) was always extremely precise in his statements, and that his memory of details, even after a notable lapse of time, was astonishingly accurate. It seems therefore highly improbable—and this is all I can state—that he should have made such a major mistake about the night of his dream. I fully acknowledge that this is not a certainty in a mathematical or factual sense: it is only a very probable assumption as far as my knowledge of the case goes. In fact, I am still quite confident that no falsification of time did actually occur, although I obviously cannot prove it.

Dr. Brunswick, however, has certainly noticed that in my paper, my opinion regarding the possible precognitive elements in the case was particularly cautious, owing to the great difficulty of making assessments about any alleged precognitive phenomenon. I wrote, in fact, that a couple of items in the occurrence seemed to me 'not fully understandable in purely "telepathic" terms', etc.—a wording which to some of my readers appeared almost deprecating.

About the second point of Dr. Brunswick's note I feel much more confident and tranquil. First of all, A. was an English-speaking patient, and my maid N. could not speak a word of English. Apart from this, she would have recoiled at the very idea of having any amount of conversational gossip with one of my patients—particularly with a non-Italian! As a matter of