We can revive by this process old well-nigh forgotten trains of thought.  This is difficult but possible.  It belongs to an advanced stage of experience or may be found in very susceptible subjects.  I do not belong at all to the latter, but I have perfectly succeeded in continuing a dream; that is to say, I have woke up three times during a dream, and, being pleased with it, wished it to go on, then fallen asleep and it went on, like three successive chapters in a novel.

We can subdue the habit of worrying ourselves and others needlessly about every trifling or serious cause of irritation which enters our minds.  There are many people who from a mere idle habit or self-indulgence and irrepressible loquacity make their own lives and those of others very miserable—­as all my readers can confirm from experience.  I once knew a man of great fortune, with many depending on him, who vented his ill-temper and petty annoyances on almost everyone to whom he spoke.  He was so fully aware of this failing that he at once, in confessing it to a mutual friend, shed tears of regret.  Yet he was a millionaire man of business, and had a strong will which might have been directed to a cure.  All peevish, fretful and talkative, or even complaining people, should be induced to seriously study this subject.

We can cure ourselves of the habit of profanity or using vulgar language.  No one doubts that a negro who believes in sorcery, if told that if he uttered an oath, Voodoo would fall upon him and cause him to waste away, would never swear again.  Or that a South Sea Islander would not do the same for fear of taboo.  Now both these forms of sorcery are really hypnotizing by action on belief, and Forethought aided by the sleep process has precisely the same result—­it establishes a fixed idea in the mind, or a haunting presence.

We can cure ourselves of intemperance.  This was, I believe, first established or extensively experimented on by Dr. CHARLES LLOYD TUCKEY.  This can be aided by willing that the liquor, if drunk, shall be nauseating.

We can repress to a remarkable degree the sensations of fatigue, hunger and thirst.  Truly no man can defy the laws of nature, but it is very certain that in cases like that of Dr. TANNER, and the Hindu ascetics who were boxed up and buried for many weeks, there must have been mental determination as well as physical endurance.  As regards this very important subject of health, or the body, and the degree to which it can be controlled by the mind or will, it is to be observed that of late years physiologists are beginning to observe that all “mental” or corporeal functions are evidently controlled by the same laws or belong to the same organization.  If “the emotions, say of anger or love, in their more emphatic forms, are plainly accompanied by varying changes of the heart and blood-vessels, the viscera and muscles,” it must follow that changes or