726 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



coast at low tide, and the fantastic analogy, which had not occurred to 

 waking consciousness, suggested itself during sleep. 



The following dream illustrates an association of quite a dif- 

 ferent order: I imagined I was sitting at a window, at the top of a 

 house, writing. As I looked up from my table I saw, with all the 

 emotions naturally accompanying such a sight, a woman in her night 

 dress appear at a lofty window some distance oif and throw herself 

 down. I went on writing, however, and found that in the course of 

 my literary employment — I am not clear as to its precise nature — the 

 very next thing I had to do was to describe exactly such a scene as 

 I had just witnessed. I was extremely puzzled at such an extraordi- 

 nary coincidence: it seemed to me wholly inexplicable. Such dreams, 

 reduplicating the imagery in a new sensory medium, are fairly com- 

 mon, with me at all events, though I can not easily explain them. 

 The association is not so much of analogy as of sensory media, in this 

 case the visual image becoming a verbal motor image. In other cases 

 a scene is first seen as in reality, and then in a picture. It is inter- 

 esting to observe the profound astonishment with which sleeping 

 consciousness apperceives such simple reduplication. 



It sometimes happens that the confused imagery of dreams in- 

 cludes elements drawn from forgotten memories — that is to say, that 

 sleeping consciousness can draw on faint impressions of the past which 

 waking consciousness is unable to reach. This is a very important 

 type of dream because of its bearing on the explanation of certain 

 dream phenomena which we are sometimes asked to bow down be- 

 fore as supernatural. I may illustrate what I mean by the following 

 very instructive case. I woke up recalling the chief items of a rather 

 vivid dream: I had imagined myself in- a large old house, where the 

 furniture, though of good quality, was ancient, and the chairs threat- 

 ened to give way as one sat on them. The place belonged to one Sir 

 Peter Bryan, a hale old gentleman who was accompanied by his son 

 and grandson. There was a question of my buying the place from 

 him, and I was very complimentary to the old gentleman's appear- 

 ance of youthfulness, absurdly affecting not to know which was the 

 grandfather and which the grandson. On awaking I said to myself 

 that here was a purely imaginative dream, quite unsuggested by any 

 definite experiences. But when I began to recall the trifling inci- 

 dents of the previous day I realized that that was far from being the 

 case. So far from the dream having been a pure effort of imagination 

 I found that every minute item could be traced to some separate 

 source. The name of Sir Peter Bryan alone completely baffled me; 

 I could not even recall that I had at that time ever heard of any one 

 called Bryan. I abandoned the search and made my notes of the 

 dream and its sources. I had scarcely done so when I chanced to 



