His next argument practically is that hallucinations are always only a kind of dreams.[11] He proves this by the large number of coincidental hallucinations which occurred in sleepy circumstances.  One man went to bed early, and woke up early; another was ‘roused from sleep;’ two ladies were sitting up in bed, giving their babies nourishment; a man was reading a newspaper on a sofa; a lady was lying awake at seven in the morning; and there are eight other English cases of people ‘awake’ in bed during an hallucination.  Now, in Dr. Parish’s opinion, we must argue that they were not awake, or not much; so the hallucinations were mere dreams.  Dreams are so numerous that coincidences in dreams can be got rid of as pure flukes.  People may say, to be sure, ’I am used to dreams, and don’t regard them; this was something solitary in my experience.’  But we must not mind what people say.

Yet I fear we must mind what they say.  At least, we must remember that sleeping dreams are, of all things, most easily forgotten; while a full-bodied hallucination, when we, at least, believe ourselves awake, seems to us on a perfectly different plane of impressiveness, and (experto crede) is really very difficult to forget.  Herr Parish cannot be allowed, therefore, to use the regular eighteenth-century argument—­ ‘All dreams!’ For the two sorts of dreams, in sleep and in apparent wakefulness, seem, to the subject, to differ in kind.  And they really do differ in kind.  It is the essence of the every night dream that we are unconscious of our actual surroundings and conscious of a fantastic environment.  It is the essence of wideawakeness to be conscious of our actual surroundings.  In the ordinary dream, nothing actual competes with its visions.  When we are conscious of our surroundings, everything actual does compete with any hallucination.  Therefore, an hallucination which, when we are conscious of our material environment, does compete with it in reality, is different in kind from an ordinary dream.  Science gains nothing by arbitrarily declaring that two experiences so radically different are identical.  Anybody would see this if he were not arguing under a dominant idea.

Herr Parish next contends that people who see pictures in crystal balls, and so on, are not so wide awake as to be in their normal consciousness.  There is ‘dissociation’ (practically drowsiness), even if only a little.  Herr Moll also speaks of crystal-gazing pictures as ’hypnotic phenomena.’[12] Possibly neither of these learned men has ever seen a person attempt crystal-gazing.  Herr Parish never asserts any such personal experience as the basis of his opinion about the non-normal state of the gazer.  He reaches this conclusion from an anecdote reported, as a not unfamiliar phenomenon, by a friend of Miss X. But the phenomenon occurred when Miss X. was not crystal-gazing at all!  She was looking out of a window in a brown study.  This is a noble example of logic.  Some one says that Miss X. was not in her normal consciousness on a certain occasion when she was not crystal-gazing, and that this condition is familiar to the observer.  Therefore, argues Herr Parish, nobody is in his normal consciousness when he is crystal-gazing.