The night a New York woman dreamed of a French professor who was preparing a piece of writing

Step 1

1896 to 1898 · Paris · Rose de Vaux-Royer’s account

A New York woman studies hypnosis in Paris and meets a professor who researches the paranormal

Rose de Vaux-Royer was an American poet. She lived in Paris from 1896 to 1898. There she studied hypnosis with the doctor Edgar Bérillon. She went to his classes at a hypnosis society in the city and at the Sorbonne, the University of Paris.

In Paris she also met Émile Boirac, a professor of philosophy and psychology at a school in the city. Boirac came to a reception Rose gave to bring together men of science. Afterward he invited her to his home to show her what he was achieving in his own experiments on paranormal phenomena.

In 1898, Rose went back to the United States. She had not been in touch with Boirac since then.

Step 3

October 11, 1907, at noon · New York · According to her letter

The next day, Rose describes the dream in a letter to an acquaintance in Cleveland

The next day, Rose wrote to Maurice Zeliqzon, an acquaintance of hers in Cleveland. Zeliqzon and Rose were members of the same society in Paris as Boirac and Bérillon. In the letter, Rose told him about the dream and asked him for Boirac’s address. This is how she began to describe the dream:

“Shall I tell you of a telepathic communication I had last night? I cannot explain it but perhaps you can.”

The letter carries a New York postmark of October 11, 1907, at twelve noon. Zeliqzon received it and kept it.

The letter speaks of something Boirac was going to write, but it doesn’t say it was a book. It doesn’t mention any mourning either. The letter was published years later in a journal, with some passages left out and marked with asterisks.

Step 5

November 10, 1907, to February 2, 1908 · Cleveland, New York, and Dijon · According to their letters and Rose

Rose writes to Boirac, and he replies that he is in mourning and is about to publish a book

Zeliqzon took a month to reply. On November 10, he sent Rose the address of Boirac, who no longer lived in Paris. He was rector of the University of Dijon, in eastern France. Zeliqzon also asked her whether, on the day before the dream, she had read anything by Boirac or by Bérillon.

Rose then wrote to Boirac. That letter was not published. According to Rose’s 1909 account, she told him what had struck her most in the dream. She told him she had seen him writing a new book. She also told him she had seen him in mourning, with a band of black cloth on his sleeve.

Boirac replied from Dijon on January 15, 1908. This is what he wrote to her:

“Indeed, I have been in mourning since last autumn. An aunt, my father’s sister, the last survivor of his brothers and sisters, died at the end of October.”

In the same letter, Boirac told her that in February he was going to publish a book on the psychic sciences. It is called La psychologie inconnue, which in English would be “The unknown psychology.” It was published in 1908 by Félix Alcan, a publisher in Paris.

According to its introduction, the book mostly brought together articles Boirac had written between 1893 and 1903. He had revised them and added some unpublished ones. The introduction cites a book published in 1907.

On February 2, 1908, Zeliqzon wrote to Rose that he found the dream remarkable. He reminded her that, in the October letter, she had said Boirac was going to write another book. The published part of that letter says “something.”

Step 6

1909 to 1910 · Dijon and New York · According to their letters and the journal

Boirac doubts that the dream fully fits, and a New York journal publishes the case

Rose wanted to publish the case. On January 30, 1909, Boirac wrote to her in English. He gave her the details of his aunt’s death. But he was not sure the dream fully fit what had happened to him:

“I am not fully sure that the circumstances of your dream or vision are in perfect agreement with the objective case to which it relates.”

In the same letter, Boirac told her that Esperantists in the United States were asking him to come to a congress in America. Esperanto is a language invented for everyone in the world to speak, and Boirac was president of its international academy. In May 1909 he still did not know whether he would go.

Rose asked James Hyslop for his opinion. He was the secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research. It was a society in New York that studied cases like this. Hyslop replied that he remembered little of the case. He told her that, in general, he thought it very likely that spirits played a part in cases like these. But he could not say so as a scientist without gathering many similar cases.

The Society’s journal published the case in June 1910, with the letters, some of them cut, under the title “Unclassified experience.”

The question remains: did Rose dream of what Boirac was preparing, or was it a coincidence?