at she was familiar (which she was not)
with the shiny back of his waistcoat, still, she saw him daily, and daily,
too, was in the way of seeing the (hypothetically) shiny surface of the
sideboard. That being the case, she had, every day, the materials,
subjective and objective, of the hallucination. Yet it only occurred
_once_, and then it precisely coincided with the death agony of the old
gentleman, and with his coatless condition. Why only that once? _C'est la
le miracle!_ 'How much for this little veskit?' as the man asked David
Copperfield.

Herr Parish next invents a cause for an hallucination, which, I myself
think, ought not to have been reckoned, because the percipient had been
sitting up with the sick man. This he would class as a 'suspicious' case.
But, even granting him his own way of handling the statistics, he would
still have far too large a proportion of coincidences for the laws of
chance to allow, if we are to go by these statistics at all.

His next argument practically is that hallucinations are always only a
kind of dreams.[11] He proves this by the large number of coincidental
hallucinations which occurred in sleepy circumstances. One man went to bed
early, and woke up early; another was 'roused from sleep;' two ladies were
sitting up in bed, giving their babies nourishment; a man was reading a
newspaper on a sofa; a lady was lying awake at seven in the morning; and
there are eight other English cases of people 'awake' in bed during an
hallucination. Now, in Dr. Parish's opinion, we must argue that they were
_not_ awake, or not much; so the hallucinations were mere dreams.
Dreams are so numerous that coincidences in dreams can be got rid of as
pure flukes. People may say, to be sure, 'I am used to dreams, and don't
regard them; _this_ was something solitary in my experience.' But we must
not mind what people say.

Yet I fear we must mind what they say. At least, we must remember that
sleeping dreams are, of all things, most easily forgotten; while a
full-bodied hallucination, when we, at least, believe ourselves awake,
seems to us on a perfectly different plane of impressiveness, and
(_experto crede_) is really very difficult to forget. Herr Parish cannot
be allowed, therefore, to use the regular eighteenth-century argument--
'All dreams!' For the two sorts of dreams, in sleep and in apparent
wakefulness, seem, to the subject, to differ in _kind_. And they really
do differ in kind. It is the ess