The curious side of supernaturalism as related to dreams is illustrated by _The Dream Gown of the Japanese Ambassador_,[72] and the more beautiful by Simeon Solomon's _Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep_. Mary Wilkins Freeman has a remarkable short story, _The Hall Bedroom_, which is one of the best illustrations of the use of dream imagery and impressions. Here the effects are alluring and beautiful, with the horror kept in the background, but perhaps the more effective because of the artistic restraint. Odors, sights, sounds, feelings, are all raised to an intensity of sensuous, slumbrous enjoyment, all subliminated above the mortal. The description of the river in the picture, on which the young man floats away to dreamy death, similar to the Japanese story referred to by Hearn, helps to give the impression of infinity that comes only in dreams. Algernon Blackwood in numerous stories not only uses the elements of dreams and nightmares but explicitly calls attention to the fact. Dream supernaturalism is employed in Barry Pain's stories, in Arthur Machen's volume,[73] and in many others. Freud's theory of dreams as the invariable result of past experiences or unconscious desires has not been stressed in fiction, though doubtless it will have its inning presently. A. Conan Doyle's _The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange_ is an amusing story of the relation of definite wishes and dreams of the ghostly. [72] By Brander Matthews. [73] _The Hill of Dreams._ These are some of the sources from which the later writers of occultism have drawn their plots. They represent a distinct advance over the Gothic and earlier supernaturalism in materials, for the modern story has gained the new elements without loss of the old. The ghostly fiction of to-day has access to the animistic or classical or medieval themes, yet has the unlimited province of present thought to furnish additional inspiration. There never was a time when thinking along general lines was more spontaneously reflected in fiction than now, and supernatural literature claims all regions for its own. Like every other phase of man's thought, ghostly fiction shows the increasing complexity of form and matter, the wealth of added material and abounding richness of style, the fine subtleties that only modernity can give. CHAPTER III MODERN GHOSTS