The sound of their own voice or the remarks of passers by would generally wake them up at the climax; their hearts then would beat wildly, they would be out of breath, if not bathed in perspiration, but they would experience withal a certain amount of satisfaction from the victory they had won and they would feel full of what a patient of mine termed "almost murderous energy." This form of "abreaction," when it does not assume the form of a constant indulgence taking the place of positive action, is rather desirable. The psychoanalytic treatment consists, in part at least, in the production of day dreams based on memories which free in the patient a certain amount of repressed energy. Thus a great deal of unrelated and unconscious material is made conscious and related. Day dreams, without any definite direction and unchecked, are likely, however, to be very dangerous and to exert a paralysing influence on the dreamer. The concentration and meditation recommended by some Hindoo philosophers can accomplish valuable results if the subject has a clear, analytical mind and knows how to correlate the scraps of thoughts which are thus allowed to rise to consciousness. For childish people, which are easily caught in the meshes of their fancies and let their imagination run away with them, that indulgence is deadly and it has led millions of Orientals into a nirvana-like idleness and weakness, destructive of energy and life, a negative escape from reality. This is one of the reasons why, in many forms of neurosis, a rest cure is the most dangerous form of treatment. The neurotic's attention is generally directed away from reality. His energy is too often deflected toward fictitious goals located outside of the real world. The neurotic has to be brought back into contact with life and human beings; he has to be trained to accept them _as they are_ and to enjoy them _for what they are_, instead of imagining _what they might be_. The idleness and seclusion of the rest cure may negative all efforts in that direction. The rest cure from which day dreams cannot be excluded, is simply an abnormal flight from reality sanctioned and abetted by a physician ignorant of psychology. The day dreams which produce happiness, which promote creation, scientific or artistic, and which lead the individual into the stream of life, are sound and healthy dreams. Those which only lead to more dreaming and away from life, are neurotic phenomena, devoid of any redeeming grace. CHAPTER XV: NEUROSIS AND DREAMS Not infrequently neuroses and psychoses are ushered in by a dream and their termination is announced by a dream. This should not be understood to mean that the dream either "causes" the neurosis or "cures" it. That mistake has often been made by psychologists of the old school. Taine, among others, cites the case of a policeman who once attended a capital execution.