These are only a few scattered personal experiences, and I have no philosophy of dreams to suggest.  It is in my case an inherited power.  My father was the most vivid and persistent dreamer I have ever met, and his dreams had a quality of unexpectedness and interest of which I have never known the like.  The dream of his, which I have told in his biography, of the finding of the grave of the horse of Titus Oates, seems to me one of the most extraordinary pieces of invention I have ever heard, because of the conversation which took place before he realised what the slab actually was.

He dreamed that he was standing in Westminster Abbey with Dean Stanley, looking at a small cracked slab of slate with letters on it.  “We’ve found it,” said Stanley.  “Yes,” said my father, “and how do you account for it?” “Why,” said Stanley, “I suppose it is intended to commemorate the fact that the animal innocence was not affected by the villainies of the master.”  “Of course!” said my father, who was still quite unaware what the inscription referred to.  He then saw on the slab the letters ITI Capitani, and knew that the stone was one that had marked the grave of Titus Oates’ horse, and that the whole inscription must have been EQUUS titi Capitani,- -"The horse of Titus the Captain”—­the “Captain” referring to the fact that my father then recollected that Titus Oates had been a Train-band Captain.

My only really remarkable dream containing a presentiment or rather a clairvoyance of a singular kind, hardly explicable as a mere coincidence, has occurred to me since I began this paper.

On the night of December 8, 1914, I dreamed that I was walking along a country road, between hedges.  To the left was a little country house, in a park.  I was proposing to call there, to see, I thought, an old friend of mine, Miss Adie Browne, who has been dead for some years, though in my dream I thought of her as alive.

I came up with four people, walking along the road in the same direction as myself.  There was an elderly man, a younger man, red-haired, walking very lightly, in knickerbockers, and two boys whom I took to be the sons of the younger man.  I recognised the elder man as a friend, though I cannot now remember who he appeared to be.  He nodded and smiled to me, and I joined the party.  Just as I did so, the younger man said, “I am going to call on a lady, an elderly cousin of mine, who lives here!” He said this to his companions, not to me, and I became aware that he was speaking of Miss Adie Browne.  The older man said to me, “You have not been introduced,” and then, presenting the younger man, he said, “This is Lord Radstock!” We shook hands and I said, “Do you know, I am very much surprised; I understood Lord Radstock to be a much older man!”