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Man Outside Himself

Prevost Battersby

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the victim of an hallucination. Goethe accosted the figure, and on its abrupt disappearance was convinced that Frederic was dead, and that he had seen his spirit. On reaching his house at Weimar, he was greeted by Frederic himself, and exclaimed: "Avaunt, you phantom!" Frederic explained that, having arrived at Weimar, soaked with rain, he had changed into Goethe's clothing, and having fallen asleep, had dreamed that he had gone out to meet him, and that he had been greeted by the very words which Goethe had used. The autoscopic incident is related by the poet in Aus Meinen Leben. "I was," he says, "riding on the footpath towards Drusenheim, and there one of the strangest presentiments occurred to me. I saw myself coming to meet myself on the same road, on horseback, but in clothes such as I had never worn. They were of light grey mingled with gold. As soon as I roused myself from this day-dream the vision disappeared. Eight years later I found myself on the identical spot, intending to visit Frederica once more, and wearing the same clothes which I had seen in my vision, but which I now wore, not from choice, but by accident." Autoscopic bilocation has been very carefully studied by Dr. Sollier, who, in his Les Phenomenes d'Autoscopie, has recounted the experiences of Drs. Lassegue, Fere, Rouginovitch and Lemaitre, and included a dozen of his own cases. He found that when the apparition exactly resembled the subject it seldom stayed long, and vanished at any excitement. When the phantom had different attributes, was smaller in stature, and was not wearing the same clothes, it might persist for hours, with varying intensity.
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