[Footnote 191: Thus Professor Beaunis (_loc. cit._) considers that dreams furnish the only rational explanation of the belief in survival after death. Jewell, again (_American Journal of Psychology_, January 1905), also considers that dreams are responsible for primitive man's inability to conceive of death as ending our association with our friends; he brings forward evidence, highly significant in this connection, to show that children, on dreaming of the dead as alive, are influenced in waking life to doubt the reality of their death. Ruths, also writing since the publication of my first paper (_Experimental-Untersuchungen über Musikphantome_, 1898, pp. 438 _et seq._), considers that the conception of an under-world is founded on dreams of the dead coming to life.] CHAPTER IX MEMORY IN DREAMS The Apparent Rapidity of Thought in Dreams--This Phenomenon largely due to the Dream being a Description of a Picture--The Experience of Drowning Persons--The Sense of Time in Dreams--The Crumpling of Consciousness in Dreams--The Recovery of Lost Memories through the Relaxation of Attention--The Emergence in Dreams of Memories not known to Waking Life--The Recollection of Forgotten Languages in Sleep--The Perversions of Memory in Dreams--Paramnesic False Recollections--Hypnagogic Paramnesia--Dreams mistaken for Actual Events--The Phenomenon of Pseudo-Reminiscence--Its Relationship to Epilepsy--Its Prevalence especially among Imaginative and Nervously Exhausted Persons--The Theories put forward to Explain it--A Fatigue Product--Conditioned by Defective Attention and Apperception--Pseudo-Reminiscence a reversed Hallucination. The peculiarities of memory in dreams--its defects, its aberrations, its excesses--have attracted attention ever since dreams began to be studied at all. It is not enough to assure ourselves that on awakening from a dream our memory of that dream may fairly be regarded as trustworthy so far as it extends. The characteristics of memory revealed within the reproduced dream have sometimes seemed so extraordinary as to be only explicable by the theory of supernatural intervention. A problem which at one time greatly puzzled the scientific students of dreaming is furnished at the outset by the apparent abnormal rapidity of the dream process, the piling together in a brief space of time of a great number of combined memories. Stories were told of people who, when awakened by sounds or contacts which must have aroused them almost immediately, had yet experienced elaborate visions which could only have been excited by the stimulus which caused the awakening. The dream of Maury--who, when awakened by a portion of the bed cornice falling on his neck, imagined that he was living in the days of the Reign of Terror, and, after many adventures, was being guillotined--has become famous.[192]