This instance was of value from the strong probability that the news could never have been supraliminally known at all;--since it was too important to have been merely glanced at and forgotten. In these cases the dream-self has presented a significant scene,--has chosen, so to say, from its gallery of photographs the special picture which the waking mind desired,--but has not needed to draw any more complex inference from the facts presumably at its disposal. I have now to deal with a small group of dreams which reason as well as remember;--if indeed in some of them there be not something more than mere reasoning on facts already in some way acquired,--something which overpasses the scheme prescribed for the present chapter. In the first place we cannot doubt that definite data already known may sometimes be treated in somnambulism or ordinary dream with more than waking intelligence. Such are the cases of mathematical problems solved in somnambulism, or of the skeletal arrangement discovered by Agassiz in common sleep for scattered bones which had baffled his waking skill. I give in Appendix IV. B. the striking case of Professor Hilprecht where dream-intelligence is carried to its highest point. Professor Romaine Newbold (who records the case) is well versed in the analysis of evidence making for supernormal powers, and his explanation of the vision as the result of "processes of associative reasoning analogous to those of the upper consciousness" must, I think, be taken as correct. But had the incident occurred in a less critical age of the world,--in any generation, one may say, but _this_,--how majestic a proof would the phantasmal Babylonian's message be held to have afforded of his veritable co-operation with the modern _savant_ in the reconstruction of his remote past! I repeat that with this case of Professor Hilprecht's we seem to have reached the utmost intensity of sleep faculty within the limits of our ordinary spectrum. In almost every region of that spectrum we have found that the sleeper's faculty, under its narrow conditions, shows scattered signs of at least a potential equality with the faculty of waking hours. We have already seen this as regards muscular movements, as regards inward vision and audition, and as regards memory; and these last records complete the series by showing us the achievement in sleep of intellectual work of the severest order. Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_ had long ago shown the world that a great poet might owe his masterpiece to the obscuration of waking sense.[49] And the very imperfection of _Kubla Khan_--the memory truncated by an interruption--may again remind us how partial must ever be our waking knowledge of the achievements of sleep.