A probable illustration of the influence of verbal association in diverting the current of a dream is seen in the harrowing narrative that follows: A lady dreamed that she went to an entertainment which turned out to be a kind of revival meeting, presided over by a lady, and full of uproar. It was suddenly realised that Hell was underneath the hall, and a man, supposed to be a slave, was torn to pieces and cast into Hell. A lady present was so much affected by the scene that she threw herself into a pool of water, and was drowned, her body being afterwards pulled out by a working man with a pitchfork. The dreamer was so overcome by these tragic events that she felt that there was nothing left but to commit suicide. Resolving to drown herself, she went to a lighthouse (which, however, somewhat resembled a bathing machine) on a height, in order to throw herself down into the sea. It was of an exquisite green tint, extremely lovely and attractive, but she had not the courage to leap in. She thought it might give her courage if she had a good meal first, so she returned to the hall and joined the lady who had presided over the meeting. They sat down to a dish of roast mutton, but, as they were eating, suddenly looked at each other with mutual understanding; they realised that they were eating the woman who had been drowned, and, it will be remarked, had been pulled out of the water by a fork. It was possible to account for every element of which this dream was made up, but its tragic character was unsupported by anything in waking life, and entirely native to the dream. The possibility of any guiding link between 'Hell' and 'hall' had not presented itself to the dreamer, nor had it occurred to me when I set down the dream as here reproduced. It must be noted, however, that the revival meeting would itself tend to suggest the idea of Hell. It seems probable that verbal associations usually play only a subordinate part. Sometimes the verbal links of association in dreams, far from introducing tragedy, lead, by the conjunction of two words of the same sound, to puns. Thus a dreamer imagined that he and some friends were looking at a house with its bedroom or bedrooms open to the air, the front wall being gone, and they were laughing at the comical effect when a mysterious voice came saying, 'A three-walled bedroom is a side-burst stor(e)y.' As the dreamer awoke, he found himself laughing at this juxtaposition of the idea of the storey of a house-side split open, and the idea of a side-splitting story. The conditions of psychic activity during sleep--when ideas drift together from widely separated regions along channels of association which are usually held closed by the higher intellectual processes--seem, indeed, to be specially favourable to the production of puns and allied forms of witticism.[38] They may, therefore, be properly regarded as closely associated with subconscious activity.[39]