n the dream
coincides with and foreruns that experience, which is a thing that dreams
have no business to do. Such coincidental dreams are necessarily 'false
memories,' scientifically speaking. Now, how does this theory of false
memory bear on coincidental hallucinations?

The insane, it seems, are apt to have the false memory 'This occurred
before,' and _then_ to say that the event was revealed to them in a
vision.[2] The insane may be recommended to make a note of the vision, and
have it properly attested, _before_ the event. The same remark applies to
the 'presentiments' of the sane. But it does _not_ apply if Jones tells me
'I saw my great aunt last night,' and if news comes _after_ this remark
that Jones's aunt died, on that night, in Timbuctoo. Yet Herr Parish
(p. 282) seems to think that the argument of fallacious memory comes in
part, even when an hallucination has been reported to another person
_before_ its fulfilment. Of course all depends on the veracity of the
narrator and the person to whom he told his tale. To take a case given:[3]
Brown, say, travelling with his wife, dreams that a mad dog bit his boy at
home on the elbow. He tells his wife. Arriving at home Brown finds that it
was so. Herr Parish appears to argue thus:

Brown dreamed nothing at all, but he gets excited when he hears the bad
news at home; he thinks, by false memory, that he has a recollection of
it, he says to his wife, 'My dear, didn't I tell you, last night, I had
dreamed all this?' and his equally excited wife replies, 'True, my Brown,
you did, and I said it was only one of your dreams.' And both now believe
that the dream occurred. This is very plausible, is it not? only science
would not say anything about it if the dream had _not_ been fulfilled--if
Brown had remarked, 'Egad, my dear, seeing that horse reminds me that I
was dreaming last night of driving in a dog-cart.' For then Brown was not
excited.

None of this exquisite reasoning as to dreams applies to waking
hallucinations, reported before the alleged coincidence, unless we accept
a collective hallucination of memory in seer or seers, and also in the
persons to whom their story was told.

But, it is obvious, memory is apt to become mythopoeic, so far as to
exaggerate closeness of coincidence, and to add romantic details. We do
not need Herr Parish to tell us _that_; we meet the circumstance in all
narratives from memory, whatever the topic, even in Herr Parish's own
writ