1892.] on the Physiology of Dreams. 593 



As he sank into repose "those laps recurred in a painful form, as if 

 he were making somersaults. He would wake up under this dream, 

 and through all the ordeal experienced the same interruption. One 

 day he told mo he could not get it out of his mind that on the 

 previous night he really did make a somersault, and that although he 

 knew it was impossible, because he neither got out of bed nor raised 

 himself, and because he felt sure that the bedstead was not likely to 

 play a trick of the sort, yet nothing could clear his mind from the 

 sensation that he had veritably turned a forward somersault, not once, 

 but several times before he awoke to consciousness. More striking 

 still, he felt, after he awoke to consciousness, that same muscular 

 strain and momentary fatigue which would follow exercise of the kind 

 named. In this instance the impression was, so to speak, set in the 

 body before going to sleep; then came a dream which would, 

 ordinarily, have been forgotten, but in the course of which the 

 impression was liberated perhaps, nay probably, by a muscular move- 

 ment of the body — raising the head on the pillow, for instance — 

 and the phenomena of the somersault were developed. 



The compound dream is frequently a continuation of a waking 

 dream. We go to sleep with something on the mind, and either the 

 mental labour continues, or, after a short rest, the subject of contem- 

 plation returns and is, or seems to be, sustained until awakening. Two 

 very different lines of mental work are thus sustained : the purest 

 reasoning, the mathematical, and the purest imaginative. I knew a 

 scholar who after a dreary night, in which he slept well physically, 

 woke in the morning with different and difficult problems quite solved 

 but mentally worn out and ready only for some active sport. I know 

 another scholar who, engaged in a work of imagination, and thinking 

 himself to sleep at the junction of cross roads of thought, has often 

 risen in the morning well advanced on one of them, and inspired to 

 write, as fast as his pen would let him, a passage or a poem. 



The compound dream is often one of memory. The memory may 

 be of things recent, but more frequently it is of things, events, or 

 persons, remembered from long ago, but impressed and fixed in the 

 mind. Dreams thus become, as it were, reminders of the past. I 

 inquired of a blind person who had an extensive knowledge of other 

 persons in his own unhappy condition whether he or they ever had 

 dreams of visible things. He explained to me that he had, and that 

 some like himself had, but that they always were dreams of objects 

 with which the mind had become familiar before the loss of the sense 

 of sight. These are dreams of memory purely, dreams called up by 

 current circumstances that have led to trains of thought connected 

 with the condition of former life when sight aided comprehension. I 

 notice that the prince of physiological writers, MuUer, relates that the 

 distinguished Huber, who had been blind from his eighteenth year, 

 in his sixty-sixth year still dreamed of objects which appeared dis- 

 tinctly visible to him, though these dreams referred to the time at 

 which he was possessed of vision. In a similar manner the deaf 



