In concluding this account of dreams, I would call attention to the importance of the transition states between sleeping and waking, in relation to the production of sense-illusion.  And this point may be touched on here all the more appropriately, since it helps to bring out the close relation between waking and sleeping illusion.  The mind does not pass suddenly and at a bound from the condition of dream-fancy to that of waking perception.  I have already had occasion to touch on the “hypnagogic state,” that condition of somnolence or “sleepiness” in which external impressions cease to act, the internal attention is relaxed, and the weird imagery of sleep begins to unfold itself.  And just as there is this anticipation of dream-hallucination in the presomnial condition, so there is the survival of it in the postsomnial condition.  As I have observed, dreams sometimes leave behind them, for an appreciable interval after waking, a vivid after-impression, and in some cases even the semblance of a sense-perception.

If one reflects how many ghosts and other miraculous apparitions are seen at night, and when the mind is in a more or less somnolent condition, the idea is forcibly suggested that a good proportion of these visions are the debris of dreams.  In some cases, indeed, as that of Spinoza, already referred to, the hallucination (in Spinoza’s case that of “a scurvy black Brazilian”) is recognized by the subject himself as a dream-image.[101] I am indebted to Mr. W.H.  Pollock for a fact which curiously illustrates the position here adopted.  A lady was staying at a country house.  During the night and immediately on waking up she had an apparition of a strange-looking man in mediaeval costume, a figure by no means agreeable, and which seemed altogether unfamiliar to her.  The next morning, on rising, she recognized the original of her hallucinatory image in a portrait hanging on the wall of her bedroom, which must have impressed itself on her brain before the occurrence of the apparition, though she had not attended to it.  Oddly enough, she now learnt for the first time that the house at which she was staying had the reputation of being haunted, and by the very same somewhat repulsive-looking mediaeval personage that had troubled her inter-somnolent moments.  The case seems to me to be typical with respect to the genesis of ghosts, and of the reputation of haunted houses.

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NOTE.

THE HYPNOTIC CONDITION.

I have not in this chapter discussed the relation of dreaming to hypnotism, or the state of artificially produced quasi-sleep, because the nature of this last is still but very imperfectly understood.  In this condition, which is induced in a number of ways by keeping the attention fixed on some non-exciting object, and by weak continuous and monotonous stimulation, as stroking the skin, the patient can be made to act conformably to the verbal or other suggestion of the operator, or to the bodily position which he is made to assume.  Thus, for example, if a glass containing ink is given to him, with the command to drink, he proceeds to drink.  If his hands are folded, he proceeds to act as if he were in church, and so on.