Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1915-12-25 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

DREAMS & GHOST STORIES.  Along the ages that separate us from Homeric timee the apparition in ,dreams of men living or dead has been a subject of philosophic speculation and of superstitious fear. Both the phantom of the living and the ghost of the dead figure in Cicero's typical tale. Two Arcadians came to Megara together, one lodged at a friend's house, the other at an inn. In the night thie latter appeared to his fellow-traveller, imploring his help, for the innkeeper was plotting his death; the sleeper sprang up in alarm, but thinking the "thiol3 of no consequence went to sleep again. Then a second time his companion appeared to him, to entreat that though he had failed to help he would at least avenge, for the innkeeper had killed him and hidden his body M a dung cart, wherefore he charged hie fellow-traveller to be early next morfl. mg at the city gate before the cart passed out. Struck with this second dream, the traveller went as bidden, and there found the cart, the body of the murdered man was in it, and the innkeeper was brought to justice. The spiritualistic, theory specialiy insiets on Cases of apparition where the person's death corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives hie phantom. There is an account by a lady, who "saw, as it were, the form of someone laid out," near the time when a brother died at Melbourne, and who mentions another lady. known to her, who thought she saw her own father look in at the Church window at the moment he was dying in his own house. Another account is given by a Shetland lady, who relates that about twenty yeare ago she and a girl ieading her pony recognised the familiar figure of one, Peter Sutherland, whom they knew to be at the time in ill-health In Edinburgh; he turned a corner and they saw no' more of him, but next week came the news of his sudden death. That the apparitional human soul bears the likeness of its fleshly body, is the principle implicitly accepted by all who believe it really and objectively present itself in dream and vision. It is indeed habitually taken for granted in animistic philosophy, savage, or civilised, that souls set free from the earthly body are recognised by a likeness to it which they still retain., whether se ghostly wanderers on earth. or inhabitants of the world beyond the grave.• Man's spirit, as Swedenborg, is his Mind, which lives. after death, in complete human form, and this is the poet's dictum in "In Memoriam ": - - -  Eternal form shall still divide. The eternal &nal from at_ beside; And I shall know him when we ineet."  There is a svtory oi a phantom skeleton in chains that haunted a .house at Bologna, showed the way to the garden where was buried the real chained, fleshless skeleton it belonged to, and came no more when the remains had been duly buried. When the Earl of Cornwall met the " fetch " of his friend, William Rufus, carried black and naked on a black goat across the Bodmin Moors, he saw that it was wounded; and afterwards he heard that at that very hour the King had been slain in the New ForeSt by the arrow oi Walter Tyrell.  ••••••••-I • • • • •• • • • •  4, • • S. • •• S. 6. . • •_S S. •