476 PHYSIOLOGY CHAP. 



Many authors, ancient and modern, have cited instances of 

 such dreams. Galen speaks of a man with one leg paralysed, 

 who had dreamt a few days previously that he had a leg of 

 stone. Arnaldo di Villanova dreamed of a bite on one foot, and 

 the following day an abscess developed there. Conrad Gessner, 

 after dreaming that a serpent bit him in the side, was attacked 

 by anthrax in that part. Pascal dreamt that he was being 

 strangled with a noose, and two days later was seized with most 

 violent angina. Alessandro Manzoni was half-awake, or perhaps 

 experimented on himself, in one of these premonitory dreams, 

 and took from it the idea of the uneasy dream of Don Eodrigo 

 previous to the outbreak of bubonic plague, a dream that claims 

 admiration for the profundity of artistic intuition and the delicate 

 psychological analysis exhibited. 



One of the most characteristic features in dreams is the 

 rapidity with which events succeed each other, and give the 

 dreamer the illusion of a time far exceeding the real period. 

 Lorrain, Egger, and Claviere claim that the current of thought in 

 dreams is far more rapid than waking thought. Pieron compares 

 this rapidity of oneiric thought to the phenomena so often described 

 of panoramic vision at the moment of death. The images called 

 out by automatic cerebral activity and unbridled by attention 

 pursue such a rapid course that sometimes if a sleeper is waked 

 by two calls at a very short interval the effect of the voice invokes 

 in his brain a dream which on waking seems to have occupied a 

 very long period. Chamans, Comte de La Vallette, when in prison 

 had a dream in the brief interval between the noise of opening the 

 door of his dungeon and closing it again when the guard was 

 changed, which in the dream appeared to him to have occupied a 

 period of not less than five hours. 



In a dream, owing to the absence of conflicting conditions, 

 everything is amplified ; the least sensation that invades the 

 consciousness becomes the starting-point of a rapid series of 

 images. " A flea bit me," writes Descartes, " and I dreamt of a 

 sword-cut ! " The very common illusion in a dream of falling to 

 the bottom of an abyss may be due, according to Wundt, to the 

 involuntary stretching of the sleeper's feet. 



The commonly observed fact that a light sleep is often peopled 

 with dreams of action suggested to Vaschide and Pieron that 

 there is a certain relation between the depth of sleep and the 

 tendency of the dream to go back into the past. 



Undoubtedly some oneiric phenomena are not mere distorted 

 memory images of the still vivid experiences of past life : memory 

 is capable in sleep of calling up events that have been forgotten 

 in the waking state. Brierre tells of a merchant who remembered 

 in a dream the person to whom he had lent a sum of money six 

 months before, whereas in the waking state he was quite unable 



