DREAMS AND ILLUSIONS. 251 



I rnyself can readily study the phenomena of 

 dreams, since I never sleep without dreaming so 

 vividly that I remember all the circumstances in the 

 morning. I have used all sorts of artifices in order to 

 trace the beginning of sleep and dreams, and always 

 with the same result, so that I am certain of the 

 accuracy of experiments whicli have been repeated a 

 hundred times. I have examined other persons who 

 have made the same observations, all of whom agree 

 with me. 



When repose, the herald of sleep and dreams, 

 begins, my thoughts wander in an irregular and some- 

 what confused manner. As they are gradually sub- 

 jected to the associations to which they successively 

 give rise, they are transformed into more vivid images, 

 a vividness which is alwaj^s in inverse proportion to 

 the attention. This gradually produces the state 

 which has been described by Maury and others as 

 hypnagogic hallucination ; that is, the images seem 

 to be real, although the subject is still partly awake, 

 and the voluntary exercise of thought is lost from 

 time to time in this species of incipient chaos. It is 

 at this point that images are really most intense, and 

 that every idea assumes a body and form, every image 

 a reality : finally, when the body and the brain have 

 reached the physiological conditions of sleep, thoughts 

 which had been changed into hypnagogic images in 

 the intermediate stage between sleep and waking, are 

 altogether transformed into the real images of dreams. 



