It sometimes happens that the dream image is slowly transformed without the dreamer realising the transformation. Thus an image of a doll may take on the character of a human being. In a dream of this kind--possibly suggested by Villiers de l'Isle Adam's _L'Eve Future_, though that book had not been recently in my mind--I imagined that a lady of my acquaintance (whose identity I could not recall on awakening) had taken a fancy to possess an artificial woman, constructed with vast ingenuity and at enormous expense. The skin and hair seemed real as I noted with a certain horror on observing the breasts and armpits, but in places--I noticed especially one arm--the creature was as defective as an ill-made doll. It was, however, able to walk with a little support, and, most remarkable of all, it gave intelligent answers to questions; this alone it was that caused me a certain surprise. What at the beginning of the dream had only been an artificial image was evidently becoming a real human being, and one can readily believe that such stories as that of Pygmalion's statue may have been suggested by dream experiences. The dream is mainly a dissolving view, because for most of us it is above all a visual phenomenon. Those people who, in their dreams, at all events, if not also in waking life, are largely of auditory type, experience dreams in which words play exactly the same shifting, developing, and dissolving part played by images in the persons of more markedly visual type. In their dreams they resemble those insane people who, in some feeble and confusional states, manifest echolalia and confabulation, their ideas drifting along the associational paths of least resistance suggested by every random word they hear. Maury records successions of dream imagery strung together in a similar manner by a procession of verbal transformations; thus in one oft-quoted dream the scenes were connected by the words, _kilomètre_, _kilos_, _Gilolo_, _Lobelia_, _Lopez_, _loto_.[33] In such a case the procession of verbal auditory imagery constitutes the basis of the dream. This is probably rare. In most people the basis of the dream is furnished by visual imagery, and auditory images only occasionally form an associative link, being more usually subordinated to the visual elements.