agical ceremonies, which have probably
nothing to do with the matter, have succeeded in making this old and
nearly universal belief seem a mere fantastic superstition. But
occasionally a person not superstitious has recorded this experience.
Thus George Sand in her Histoire de ma Vie mentions that, as a little
girl, she used to see wonderful moving landscapes in the polished back
of a screen. These were so vivid that she thought they must be
visible to others.

Recent experiments have proved that an unexpected number of people
have this faculty. Gazing into a ball of crystal or glass, a crystal
or other smooth ring stone, such as a sapphire or ruby, or even into a
common ink-pot, they will see visions very brilliant. These are often
mere reminiscences of faces or places, occasionally of faces or places
sunk deep below the ordinary memory. Still more frequently they
represent fantastic landscapes and romantic scenes, as in an
historical novel, with people in odd costumes coming, going and
acting. Thus I have been present when a lady saw in a glass ball a
man in white Oriental costume kneeling beside a leaping fountain of
fire. Presently a hand appeared pointing downwards through the flame.
The _first_ vision seen pretty often represents an invalid in bed.
Printed words are occasionally read in the glass, as also happens in
the visions beheld with shut eyes before sleeping.

All these kinds of things, in fact, are common in our visions between
sleeping and waking (illusions hypnagogiques). The singularity is
that they are seen by people wide awake in glass balls and so forth.
Usually the seer is a person whose ordinary "mental imagery" is
particularly vivid. But every "visualiser" is not a crystal seer. A
novelist of my acquaintance can "visualise" so well that, having
forgotten an address and lost the letter on which it was written, he
called up a mental picture of the letter, and so discovered the
address. But this very popular writer can see no visions in a crystal
ball. Another very popular novelist can see them; little dramas are
acted out in the ball for his edification. {58}

These things are as unfamiliar to men of science as Mr. Galton found
ordinary mental imagery, pictures in memory, to be. Psychology may or
may not include them in her province; they may or may not come to be
studied as ordinary dreams are studied. But, like dreams, these
crystal visions enter the domain of the ghostly only whe