You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There are few literatures as extensive or as monotonously repetitive as that of psychic research. It would almost seem that the only people who do not observe, record, and write books about telepathic and precognitive occurrences are the psychoanalysts who, at this rate, may soon become an isolated, however select, minority.
Sabine's book marks a certain advance over most of the lay literature in this fertile field in that the author, a professional writer, has not limited himself simply to a description of those mental occurrences which bear a more or less one-to-one correspondence to the external events which they are presumed in some way to mirror. He has discovered the principle of symbolic equivalences, as well as the process of distortion, which in dreams, for instance, transforms a perceived residue into a somewhat disguised manifest representation. Accepting these principles, he demonstrates, from a diary of twenty-five years of self-observation, that the presumptive building blocks of many dreams are drawn from sources entirely inaccessible to consciousness. He further attempts to show that certain of our waking thoughts, actions, and physiological reactions are also conditioned by events which, as far as our ordinary means of sensory perception go, 'we wot not of'.
Curiously enough, the author not only insists on staying strictly on the surface in his foraging for relevant residues, but he frequently, and with an almost plaintive defensiveness, challenges the psychoanalyst to make something out of the bits of stuff he has brought together in his magpielike collection. The beauty of it is that it is impossible for the psychoanalyst not to make something of it.
The aspect of Sabine's experience which is of most interest to him is that which he puts under the heading of precognition—the presumably extra-chance correspondence between a mental representation at time A and an event in actuality at a later time B. Utilizing his hypotheses of symbolic equivalen