The cause of the vision is sometimes an association of ideas or images, which is easy to trace. Here is an example: I was once in a spiritistic group, and among those present were several sensitives presenting subconscious or paraconscious automatisms, with the features of ordinary somnambulism. I begged one young girl, of about fifteen or sixteen years old, to look into a white crystal ball of four centimetres in diameter. Almost without transition she saw goldfish in the ball. Every one knows the spherical bowls in which goldfish are put; as it happened, there was a bowl of this kind in the room. The idea of a transparent bowl was naturally associated with that of goldfish; this subconscious association provoked the visual image of the fish. Facts of this kind are the simplest; their psychological mechanism is easy to penetrate; the associations of images are almost logical, and their dreamlike character is scarcely marked. In the above case, the impossibility of placing the fish in a crystal ball is not perceived by the consciousness, which suffers the succession of images empirically associated; the globe of water containing the fish resembled in its form and aspect the transparent glass ball; therefore, the latter evoked the image of the former, and the fish which it contained. This association is very intelligible. Here is another example borrowed from experiments I made with a remarkable sensitive—the one with whom the hallucination becomes generalised. This person, looking in the crystal, perceived a railway-station, and saw portmanteaux in the luggage-room. He then plunged right into the dream, and imagined he was going to take away his own portmanteau; he entered the luggage-room, took his trunk and opened it. It contained a particularly horrible dead body, which leaped out of the portmanteau, and bitterly complained of being disturbed. It threw itself upon the sensitive, who immediately fled, pursued by the dead body. After a desperate chase, the sensitive darted into a road which crossed a park. This park, in reality, is situated at more than six hundred miles from the railway-station, where he believed he saw the portmanteaux: this distance had disappeared in the vision. The dead body took a corresponding road; the two roads met on a hill, where the persecutor made a dead set at the sensitive; the latter fell, and the dead body stopped and bent down to strike him. The visionary gave him a kick in the stomach, and stretched him full length on the ground. The hallucination then ceased abruptly, and the sensitive found himself back in his room, in front of the crystal. The vision was so intense, that he was still upset with fright, and breathless from running.