In the last chapter we emphasised the fact that one of the first products of Narcissism was the infantile difficulty of distinguishing between fact and phantasy, of realising the world outside oneself. This tendency to mix up fact with phantasy is by no means only to be found in an abnormal mind. It is present in some degree in all persons; each one feels himself to be the most real thing present, and in feeling this he has a tendency to believe that others round him are in some way less real, though, fortunately, very few carry it far enough to imagine that all the others are merely part of a dream in which the dreamer is the only real figure, as the Red King in “Alice Through the Looking Glass” is supposed to have done, when the remark is made to Alice, “You’re only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there king was to wake you would go out bang--just like a candle!” And yet quite a large number of people find it difficult to realise firstly, that they must die, and secondly that the rest of the world will not die also when they die. They know, of course, that this latter is not the case, yet they cannot look upon it as a commonplace fact. Their Narcissism refuses to contemplate their own mortality. It represses the fact and leaves the idea vague and unreal to them. In children, the difficulty of distinguishing between phantasy and reality is quite normally much more accentuated than in adults. And since they start in a world of phantasy and their training is to lead them to a world of reality, it is obvious that the halfway stages will be obscured by a strange mixture of the two. All children go through the stage in which phantasy and reality are by no means clearly differentiated, and most young children succeed, day by day, in fulfilling impossible wishes in phantasies in a manner which a properly developed adult can never do. A little boy desires to possess a pony; if this be impossible his imagination gives life to a rocking-horse, and failing that he may tie a piece of string to a chair, and with great pleasure and much emotion urge on his fiery untamed steed across mountain and desert. He fulfils his wishes immediately by means of a phantasy, which, for the time being, successfully replaces reality. If this child grows up normally, this possibility of phantastic fulfilment should gradually disappear. How many adults, for instance, could take a bath-tub into their dining-room, sit in it, and with the aid of a vivid imagination thoroughly enjoy a pleasant sail at sea? We trust no one, at any rate of our readers, for they would be of that type which has no perspective, and they would most certainly fail in their vocation as practical men and women. Yet remnants of phantasy thinking remain with everyone, and in a moderate degree, so far as we know, such remnants do but little harm if they are present in small measure only, and kept in water-tight compartments.