account for this image; the theories that most easily suggest themselves are either that the dead person has never really died, or else that he has come back from the dead for a brief space. The mental and emotional conflict which such dreams involve renders them very vivid. They make a profound impression even after awakening, and for some sensitive persons are almost too sacred to speak of. When a series of these dreams occurs concerning the same dead friend the tendency seems to be, on the whole--though there are certainly many exceptions--for the living reality of the vision of the dead friend to be more and more positively affirmed. Whether awake or asleep, it is very difficult for us to resist the evidence of our senses. It is even more difficult asleep than awake, for, as we have seen reason to believe, apperception, with the critical control it involves, is weakened. Just as the savage or the child accepts as a reality the illusion of the sun traversing the sky, just as the paranoiac accepts the reality of the hallucinations he is subjected to, and gradually weaves them into a more or less plausible theory, so the dreamer seems to employ all the acutest powers of sleeping reason available to construct a theory in support of the reality of the visions of his dead friend. Sometimes atypical dreams of the dead occur in which even from the first there appears little clash or doubt. When the vision can thus easily be accepted, it is sometimes a source of consolation, joy, and even religious faith which may still persist in the waking state. Chabaneix has, for instance, recorded the dream experiences of a poet and philosopher who had been deeply attached to a woman with whom his relations were both passionate and intellectual. From the night after her death onwards, at intervals, he had dreams of the beloved woman, at first appearing as a floating vision, later as a vividly seen and tangible person; these dreams caused refreshment and mental invigoration, and seemed to bring the dreamer into renewed communication with his dead friend.[186]