At the same time it is these characteristics which make dreams a fit subject of serious study. It was not until the present century that the psychological importance of the study of insanity was recognized. So recent is the study of savage mind that the workers who have laid its foundation are yet all living. The systematic investigation of children only began yesterday. To-day our dreams begin to seem to us an allied subject of study, inasmuch as they reveal within ourselves a means of entering sympathetically into ideas and emotional attitudes belonging to narrow or ill-adjusted states of consciousness which otherwise we are now unable to experience. And they have this further value, that they show us how many abnormal phenomena--possession, double consciousness, unconscious memory, and so forth--which have often led the ignorant and unwary to many strange conclusions, really have a simple explanation in the healthy normal experience of all of us during sleep. Here, also, it is true that we ourselves and our beliefs are to some extent "such stuff as dreams are made of." FOOTNOTES: [1] On Dreaming of the Dead. Psychological Review, September, 1895. In this paper I reported several cases showing the nature and evolution of dreams concerning dead friends. I have since received evidence from various friends and correspondents, scientific and unscientific, of both sexes, confirming my belief in a frequency of this type of dream. Professor Binet (L'Année Psychologique, 1896) has also furnished a case in support of my view, and is seeking for further evidence. [2] In Japan stories of the returning of the dead are very common. Lafcadio Hearn gives one as told by a Japanese which closely resembles the type of dream I am discussing. "A lover resolves to commit suicide on the grave of his sweetheart. He found her tomb and knelt before it and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him 'Anata!' and felt her hand upon his hand; and he turned and saw her kneeling beside him, smiling and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said: 'Do not doubt; it is really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried because my parents thought me dead--buried too soon. Yet you see I am not dead, not a ghost. It is I; do not doubt it!'" [3] Many saints (Saint Ida, of Louvain, for example) claimed the power of rising into the air, and one asks one's self whether this faith may not be based on dream experiences mistranslated by a disordered brain. M. Raffaelli, the eminent French painter, who is subject to these sleeping experiences of floating on the air, confesses that they are so convincing that he has jumped out of bed on awaking and attempted to repeat the experience. "I need not tell you," he adds, "that I have never been able to succeed."