three o'clock
He put it that if there were such spirits on this plane , I must have seen them or have had some quite first-hand evidence of their existence ; and when I said that I had seen black people , Indians , and so on , he cross-examined me until I got confused . You see , I had to confess that they were n't , strictly speaking , black , that they wore clothes , and washed , and lived in houses ; and he got me involved in apparent contradictions -- you have no idea how easy it is , when you are trying to be very lucid -- and then he changed the subject with the remark that I was a very poor witness . It was about this time that I began to lose my temper . It was after three o'clock when we got to that point , and I was getting very tired , and , strange as it may appear , curiously doubtful about my own existence . I had for some time been coming to the conclusion that he did not quite believe in my reality ; and after he had dismissed my account of the black races as being untrustworthy , he said , half to himself , that quite probably I was nothing more than an hallucination , a thought projection of his own mind . And after that I got more and more annoyed -- partly , I think , because I had a kind of haunting fear that what he had said might be true . When you have been talking to a spirit for over three hours in the middle of the night , you are liable to doubt anything .