498 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the transitional stages from sleep to wakefulness, in which partial ad- 

 justment to the real environment, partial domination of the dreamy 

 unadjusted or inwardly absorbed consciousness is in control. In such 

 a condition a night operator at a small railway station, who was rarely 

 called between midnight and four o'clock and frequently slept during 

 parts of these hours, though always awakening to the combination of 

 clicks that formed his personal summons, dozed off at midnight, and was 

 awakened an hour later by the appearance of a conductor of a special 

 train that had arrived without awakening him. The latter at once 

 asked him for his train orders. The signal was displayed preventing 

 any train from passing the station without stopping for orders; on 

 the desk at the operating key was an order in his own handwriting, 

 which was verified and found to be correct. With only the feeblest 

 recollection thereof, the drowsy or sleeping operator had interpreted 

 and recorded accurately his telegraphic duties. It is doubtless more 

 likely that in such a half-awake condition the wrong response would 

 be made, such as that of an operator under similar conditions who, 

 suddenly aroused, went to an automatic vending-machine and tried to 

 call up the despatcher by manipulating it. The half-awake, half- 

 oriented consciousness is typically not critical, is satisfied with partial 

 resemblances, and is suggestible; it occupies the middle ground be- 

 tween the lapses arising from a temporarily sleeping orientation and 

 the more serious disturbances sequent to more fundamental lesions of 

 consciousness. 



Revery and Dreaming as Lapsed Procedure. 

 We have now to observe that the apperceptive recognition takes 

 place on the basis of the preparedness, the qualification to interpret, 

 that is the expression of previous experience, dominant habits, cus- 

 tomary modes of absorption ; and that much of this preliminary setting 

 or tuning of the mental instrument goes on subconsciously. We have 

 found a rather effective formula for certain groups of lapses in positing 

 that two trains of ideas cross, or intermingle, or get their respective 

 components interchanged. Now, if one of these is the more attentive 

 reaction to what is objectively presented, and the other what is less 

 reflectively supplied from the subconscious preparatory mechanism, our 

 formula could be extended to a further range of elaborative processes. 

 A graduate of the University of Michigan, upon coming to Wisconsin, 

 found himself for some time reading the posters announcing football and 

 other events as referring to Michigan, the initial If being inattentively 

 interpreted as an M, and the rest following from the inner expectation. 

 Expectant attention, itself largely subconscious, enters to modify per- 

 ception and to prepare the way for more and more startling illusions and 

 misinterpretations. Similarly in regard to associations : A., hearing the 



