[Footnote 262: Synesius refers to conversations with sheep in dreams, and he was probably the first to suggest that such dream phenomena may be the origin of fables in which animals speak. The dog and the cat, as we should expect, seem most frequently to speak in the dreams of civilised people. Thus I dreamed that I had a conversation with a cat who spoke with fair clearness and sense, though the whole of her sentences were not intelligible. I was not surprised at this relative lack of intelligibility, but neither was I surprised at her speaking at all. I have also encountered a talking parrot whose speech was more relevant than that of most talking parrots; this somewhat surprised me. In legends a wider range of animals are able to speak, no doubt because the primitive legend-makers were familiar with a wider range of animal life. How natural it is to the uninstructed mind to treat animals like human beings is well shown by the experiences of Helen Keller, the blind deaf-mute, who writes (_The World I Live in_, p. 147): 'After my education began, the world which came within my reach was all alive.... It was two years before I could be made to believe that my dogs did not understand what I said, and I always apologised to them when I ran into or stepped on them.'] [Footnote 263: _Journal of Mental Science_, January 1909, p. 16.] [Footnote 264: 'Images and thoughts,' he said, 'possess a power in and of themselves independent of that act of the judgment or understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in dreams.... Add to this a voluntary lending of the will to this suspension of one of its own operations, and you have the true theory of stage illusion.'] [Footnote 265: Quoted by Paul Delior, _Remy de Gourmont et son Œuvre_, p. 14.] [Footnote 266: Thus even Leonardo da Vinci (Solmi, _Frammenti_, p. 285) acknowledged the benefit which he had gained by gazing at clouds or at mud-bespattered walls; and recommended the practice to other artists, for thereby, he says, they will receive suggestions for landscapes, battlepieces, 'and infinite things,' which they may bring to perfection. He compared this to the possibility of hearing words in the sounds of bells. Some other distinguished artists have adopted somewhat similar practices which are fundamentally the child's habit of seeing pictures in the fire.] [Footnote 267: Thus Tennyson (_Memoir_, by his son, vol. i. p. 320) was subject from boyhood to a kind of waking trance. 'This has generally come upon me,' he wrote, 'through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently.' (It thus seems to have been a sort of auto-hypnotisation.) In this state, individuality seemed to dissolve, he said, and he found in it a proof that the extinction of personality by death would not involve loss of life, but rather a fuller life. We are so easily convinced in these matters!]