BELIEF IN TELEPATHY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21906, 15 September 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

BELIEF IN TELEPATHY

MANY INSTANCES CITED || HUSBANDS AND WIVES _____ JOSEPH CONRAD'S EXPERIENCES "Is it quite common for husbaites and wives to be in telepathic communication with each other?" asks a writer in the Daily Mail. That this ig • so is the impression given by numerous letters received from those, who read of instances of alleged telepathy quoted recently in the newspaper mentioned. A correspondent said that while travelling in a train from Derby to London he received a "sudden and surprising conviction " that his son had .* • passed an examination in which he had thought the boy had failed. On reaching home, the correspondent stated, he found that at the moment he received the conviction his §§ wife had received the news of the result of the examination. Her first M thought had been how she could let her husband know the good knews. Among the letters received next day was one from Mr. R. L. Megroz, literary biographer and author of a book on Joseph Conrad. He said: "The late Joseph Conrad, the famous novelist, was often in unexpected telepathic contact with his wife. He told mg of this, and Mrs. Conrad has recorded interesting examples in her reminiscences of her husband." Statement By Urs. Gonrad Mrs. Conrad told of her belief in the telepathy between her late husband and herself, and mentioned experiences which are not included in her book. "On one occasion," she said, "wo were spending a few days apart, and I awoke exactly at one o'clock in the morning and voiced what I had taken to be a vivid dream to an aunt, whose room I was sharing. " I distinctly saw my husband sitting in a hansom cab driving under a railway arch. Tho road was wet, and, to my horror, the horse slipped, pitching the fare out on thp road. The next morning I reached the rooms we were staying in, and the postman opened the door with a serious expression on , " his face. He began at once to explain that the night before my husband hjd been involved in an accident. " I interrupted him quickly. ' You mean that he was thrown out of a hansom cab at one o'clock this morning because the horse slipped on the wet road,' I said. The man gasped, and then asked, ' How did you know? ' Search For a Book "Then frequently my husband would be looking for a hook and would decline to tell me the title,- but sometimes in the night I would wake, make my way down into the study, and go straight to the volume he required, and I had not had the least idea the night before wfiat it was he was looking for." Many readers' letters, it is stated by the Daily Mail, show that although telepathy has usually been reported in connection with deaths and accidents, it is common in ordinary affairs of family interest. Writing from Edgware, Middlesex, a woman reader says: " For several years now my husband and I have had telepathic experiences. I have had many instances of the communication of good news. Unfortunately, the one I remember most clearly had to do with bad news, now happily forgotten. " My husband went to the office ia the ordinary way in the morning. There had been no .hint of business trouble of any . kind, and he went off in good spirits. About three o'clock ■ in the afternoon, when I was resting, I had a sudden terrible conviction thai he had been dismissed. Mother and Daughter " It was so contrary to all that I had been thinking that, after trying to reason it away for some minutes, I decided that the si molest thing would . be to ring him up. When I got through to him I asked him if there was any news. He said, ' I'll tell you when I come home.' " I knew then that it had happened, and when he came home and told me that his firm had been amalgamated with another one and that he had been given notice, he was only confirming what I already knew. He had received the notice at the very time I had been aroused by the communication." Apparently such inexplicable communication is common too between mother and daughter, sometimes between mother and son. One woman writes: "Mv mother used to say to me: ' I shall always know if anything happens to you,' and I found that she often did. She would say to me when I came home at night that at some time of the day she had become very depressed or very elated. It always turned out that something pleasant or unpleasant had happened in my work at those times." In the Office Sometimes these sudden little telepathic communications take place between people who work in the same office. A clerk in a solicitor's office in London writes: " I have had scores and scores of such communications, but none of them has had anvthing to do I with trouble or disaster. They are usu- | ally about quite unimportant things. " A few days ago I was writing a letter when I suddenly remembered that I had not returned a book which had been lent to me some weeks before. At that very moment a colleague looked in at the door of the office and said: ' Have you returned that book to Williams? ' There was absolutely nothing that could have set us both together thinking about that book. "To suggest that it was a coincidence is a much more fantastic explanation than that there is some not-yet-understood communication of mind with mind."