"The patient, a middle aged woman lost a child she loved dearly one year and a half before the onset of the disease. The circumstances of the child's death were particularly sad as the mother was not allowed to visit the little sufferer at the hospital on account of the contagious character of his disease. She also felt disturbing doubts as to the competence of the first physician who attended her child. "She had been 'nervous and run down' since the child's death. She is married to a cripple twenty years her senior. She had to go to work in order to help support the household and to live with relatives of her husband's who did not contribute to the pleasantness of her home life." Have we not here all the environmental conditions which would drive a neurotic to withdraw his attention from reality through a protracted period of sleep? From the fact that I have instituted a comparison between sleep and the sleeping sickness, the reader should not draw the conclusion that I attribute to sleep any neurotic character. Sleep is a compromise, as I shall show later, when discussing dream life, between what the human animal was meant to do and what it can do in reality. The neurosis, also is a compromise, but it is a compromise that fails, while sleep is a compromise which is successful, beneficial and acceptable to all. CHAPTER IV: HYPNOGOGIC AND HYPNOPOMPIC VISIONS The curve of sleep depth shows that our withdrawal from reality is not sudden but gradual. The transition from wakefulness to sleep is characterized at first by blurred visions, colours, shapes, moving objects with a scarcely defined outline, and immediately after by curiously symbolical visions, known as hypnogogic visions. Those phenomena are difficult to study for they are forgotten by the end of the night. The observer has to train himself to wake up after a few minutes of unconsciousness, a result which is achieved without difficulty after a few trials. The first visions of the night are in every subject I have asked and in myself, symbolical of the passage from one state to another. One hypnogogic vision I have had many times is of wading slowly into a lake or the sea, until the water reaches to the middle of my body after which I start swimming.[2] One night when I had a little difficulty in falling asleep my hypnogogic vision represented a truckman looking like myself whipping a team of horses hitched to a big load who were crossing a very high bridge leading from the city into the open. Another night, after seeing the "Follies," I dreamt that the police was trying vainly to quell a disturbance and that the rioters succeeded in placing their own police in charge of the disturbance. The newcomers were attired like the front row girls of the Follies. No more symbolical picture of the whole nervous situation could be found. The day's repressions being gradually replaced by the "follies" of dreamland.