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The incident to be described took place about nine years ago. It was not my intention to write about it because the light that it was possible to throw on its determination was, by strict analytic standards, insufficient. Important material produced by the patient before his occult experience and closely connected with it was totally forgotten immediately afterwards, and the amnesia remained so resistant to analysis that the failure of my efforts makes it intelligible that hitherto I should not have felt any great inclination to publish the experience. Recently, however, there have been a number of analytic publications about occult phenomena, and in particular precognition (6), (7), (8), (23). These authors assume the reality of the occult experience.
According to Eisenbud's theory, an event subsequent to a dream can be used in dream-formation as if it were 'residue of the day' just like any other experience of the dreamer's before he fell asleep.
It will be recalled that Freud in his New Introductory Lectures devoted a whole chapter to 'Dreams and the Occult' (15). The phenomena that he observed were, however, telepathic rather than precognitive; the patient's manifest dreams contained references to the analyst's unexpressed thoughts. Freud points to an important condition for the telepathic discovery by the patient of what is taking place in the analyst's mind; namely that the latter's interest has been temporarily diverted from his patient and he has become completely absorbed in his private interests. Balint (1) took up Freud's assumption on the strength of an observation by Servadio (23) and worked out its transference and counter-transference aspects.
Eisenbud's observations and mine are on a different plane; we are concerned, not with detection of the analyst's mental processes, but with apparent premonition of external events. A patient of Eisenbud's (8) dreamt, for instance, that she heard on the wireless that an aircraft in which her friend was trav