Most of us know this feeling, all the circumstances in which we find ourselves have already occurred, we have a…
- Date of account
- Published 1897
- Source
- The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
- Reference
- The Book of Dreams and Ghosts · selected passage 27
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
Most of us know this feeling, all the circumstances in which we find ourselves have already occurred, we have a prophecy of what will happen next "on the tip of our tongues" (like a half-remembered name), and then the impression vanishes
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyMost of us know this feeling, all the circumstances in which we find ourselves have already occurred, we have a prophecy of what will happen next "on the tip of our tongues" (like a half-remembered name), and then the impression vanishes. Scott complains of suffering through a whole dinner-party from this sensation, but he had written "copy" for fifty printed pages on that day, and his brain was breaking down. Of course psychology has explanations. The scene _may_ have really occurred before, or may be the result of a malady of perception, or one hemisphere of the brain not working in absolute simultaneousness with the other may produce a double impression, the first being followed by the second, so that we really have had two successive impressions, of which one seems much more remote in time than it really was.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.