ABSTRACT
He had an exchange with William James in July, 1891, at a time of en forced rest in bed when he was recovering from an attack of arsenic poisoning which was thought to have been caused by a new “Turkey Red” wallpaper in his wife's bedroom.2 He and James, it seems, had fallen into conversation upon some joint public or club occasion. James, indefatigable in collecting mental phenomena, had mentioned a case of “open-eyed sleep visions,” the words James used in a letter which followed their meeting, a communication inviting Olmsted's experiences.3 Olmsted responded with an eager interest. He recalled that, on the long voyage to China when he had had scurvy, he had tried to stay awake while on duty on the forecastle in order to prevent himself being washed overboard. He remembered that he had gone to sleep with his eyes open, and not hearing or seeing his captain approach, had in vited a reprimand or even a blow. He had had another experience traveling on a train only a year before talking with James when he had dreamed with his eyes open that he had given a conductor his ticket-and found he had not done so in fact. Warming to this confessing of strange experiences, Olmsted
went on with a family experience that he and Mary and the others had had in the old Dutch farmhouse at Southside. For entertainment one night, Frederick had made up a story about a ghost, a British soldier-ghost, created to fit the creaky, aging house, a drummer boy locked in the cellar for drunk enness, forgotten there, and left to starve when the British abandoned the place after a short occupation. The young Olmsteds and their lively guests then kept the story going by imagining that they heard him on stormy eve nings. They gave themselves a pleasurable shiver and frightened a succession of Irish maids. Then, oddly, as if they had brought a ghost to life, they found the brassplate off the belt of a one-time real British soldier in the old carriage house on the farm.4 William James sent back a postcard, thanked Olmsted for his highly curious accounts, and added Olmsted's open-eyed visions to his widening collection of curious mental states.5
