ABSTRACT
In 1886 three founding members of the Society for Psychical Research, Edmund Gurney, Frederic W.H. Myers and Frank Podmore published a collection of dreams as part of their collaborative study Phantasms of the Living (1886). Enlisted to further their argument for telepathic communication, these dream accounts were drawn from subjects across the globe, including Australia, New Zealand, India, America and Europe. Gurney was also keen to define the structural and ontological specificity of dreams as a significant aspect of a more expansive ‘field of inquiry’ into the nature and possibilities of ‘transferred impressions’ between one mind and another.1 He insisted that while some dreams are composed of transient and vague impressions of material objects or events that ‘pass through the mind clothed in the faintly represented imagery in which a waking train of memory or of reverie will embody its contents’, other dreams generate ‘vivid and detailed imagery which remains engraved on the memory as sharply as those of a striking scene in waking life’ (vol. 1, pp. 295-6). Subjecting these myriad forms of dream imagery to systematic, evidence-
based interpretation was vital to the credibility of psychical research into telepathic dreaming. The challenge for Gurney, Myers and Podmore was to extrapolate an accurate transcription of the dream from the inevitable retrospective embellishments and mythologizing impulses of the dreamer. This was especially charged given the need to substantiate their claims for the telepathic communication of verifiable historical events, as Gurney observes:
When actual facts are learnt, a faint amount of resemblance may often suggest a past dream, and set the mind on the track of trying accurately to recall it. This very act involves a search for details, for something tangible and distinct; and the real features and definite incidents which are now present in the mind, in close association with some general scene or fact which actually figured in the dream, will be apt to be unconsciously read back into the dream.
