The Stratagem and Other Stories

This was true; she had not been told. But the next morning we heard that my “intuition” was correct. As soon as I was well enough, we began our ex- periments again. My powers had returned, and in triple force. Arthur explained my “intuition” as follows: “The doc- tor (when you last saw him) did not know consciously that he had cancer; but subconsciously Nature gave warning. You read this subconsciously, and it sprang into your consciousness when you read on the nurse's face that he was ill.” This, farfetched as it may seem, at least avoids the shallow theories about “telepathy.” From this time my powers constantly increased. I could read my husband's thoughts from imperceptible movements of his face as easily as a trained deaf-mute can sometimes read the speech of a distant man from the movements of his lips. Gradually as we worked, day by day, I found my grasp of detail ever fuller. It is not only that I could read emotions; I could tell whether he was thinking 3465822 or 3456822. In the year following my illness we made 436 experiments of this kind, each extending over sev- eral hours; in all 9363, with only 122 failures, and these all, without exception, partial. The year following, our experiments were extended to a reading of his dreams. In this I proved equally suc- cessful. My practice was to leave the room before he woke, write down the dream that he had dreamt, and await him at the breakfast-table, where he would com- pare his record with mine. Invariably they were identical, with this exception, that my record was always much fuller than his. He would nearly always, however, purport to remember the details supplied by me; but this detail has (I think) no real scientific value. But what does it all matter, when I think of the hor- ror impending?