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Emperor Tiberius - And his gift of night vision
Identifier
022724
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Flammarion, C., Carroll, L, - Death and its mystery: before death
206 DEATH AND ITS MYSTERY
Light has its degrees and seems never to descend to zero. Certain men are nyctalopes.
Such was the Emperor Tiberius. When he chanced to awake during the night, he could make out all the objects in his chamber; his eyes were very large . "Erat praegrandibus oculis,” we read in Suetonius,”qui cum mirum est, noctu etiam et in tenebris viderent; ab breve et cum a somno potuisent deinde nebescebant."
The Abbe Mussaud, a professor at the college of La Rochelle in 1820, author of a curious little book called “Roman l’optique, " reports that he knew a lady in that city whose eyes had this quality and who could see quite well in the darkness, not merely for a few moments, as Tiberius did, but for a long time, distinguishing even a pin on the ground. Her eyes also were very large. Nevertheless, this visual power was not permanent, and showed only at certain periods of suffering and languor.
On January 3rd, 1899, when I was dining with my friend Bartholdi, the great sculptor, the daughter of Dr Chaillou, Madame Peytal, told me that her cousin Mademoiselle Varanne was gifted with this faculty. They heard her reading aloud one night and discovered her sitting on her bed, without a light, reading a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier, which she had taken from the doctor’s library. She was a somnambulist.