[Footnote 47: A somewhat similar mistaken self-detachment may even occur momentarily in the waking condition. Thus Jastrow (_The Subconscious_, p. 137) refers to the 'lapse of consciousness' of a lady student who, while absorbed in her work, heard outside the door the shuffling of rubber heels such as she herself wore, and said 'There goes----,' naming herself. That delusion was no doubt due to the eruption of a dream-like state of distraction. As regards the visual phantasm of the self (which has sometimes been seen by men of very distinguished intellectual power) it may be noted that it is favoured by the conditions of dream life. Our dream imagery is all pictural, sometimes even to dream consciousness, and to see oneself in the picture is, therefore, not so very much more remarkable than it is in waking life to come upon oneself among a bundle of photographs.] [Footnote 48: As regards the significance of snakes in dreams, it may be remarked that the followers of Freud regard them as being, in the dreams of women, as they are in the speech and myths of primitive peoples, erotic symbols (_e.g._ Karl Abraham, _Traum und Mythus_, 1909, p. 19). It must be remembered, however, that this erotic symbolism is but a small part of the emotional interest aroused by snakes which are an extremely common source of fear, especially in the young. See _e.g._ Stanley Hall, 'A Study of Fears,' _American Journal of Psychology_, 1897, pp. 205 _et seq_.] [Footnote 49: It may even occur that a person partly wakes up, perceives what is going on around him, converses about it, falls asleep again, and imagines in the morning that the whole episode was a dream. Hammond, who also denies that we can dream we are dreaming, gives a case in illustration (_Treatise on Insanity_, p. 190).] [Footnote 50: The vision of the dream world we thus attain corresponds exactly to the philosophy of life set forth by Jules de Gaultier, perhaps the most subtle and original of living thinkers; according to Gaultier the psychic improvisation which has created the spectacle of the world has, as it were, sworn 'never to recognise itself beneath the masks it has assumed, in order to retain the joy of an unending play of the unforeseen.'] [Footnote 51: Dissociation may be defined as a condition in which, in the words of Tannery (_Revue Philosophique_, October 1898), 'the various organisms of the brain which in the waking state accomplish distinct functions with satisfactory agreement are, on the contrary, in a state of semi-independence.' There is, in Greenwood's words (_Imagination in Dreams_, p. 41), a 'loosening of mental bonds,' corresponding to the relaxation of muscular tension which also occurs before going to sleep.]