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, 212 CHAPTER X CONCLUSION The Fundamental Nature of Dreaming--Insanity and Dreaming--The Child's Psychic State and the Dream State--Primitive Thought and Dreams--Dreaming and Myth-Making--Genius and Dreams--Dreaming as a Road into the Infinite, 261 INDEX, 283 THE WORLD OF DREAMS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The House of Dreams--Fallacies in the Study of Dreams--Is it Possible to Study Dreams?--How Fallacies may be Avoided--Do we always Dream during Sleep?--The Two Main Sources of Dreams with their Sub-divisions. When we fall asleep we enter a dim and ancient house of shadow, unillumined by any direct ray from the outer world of waking life. We are borne about through its chambers, without conscious volition of our own; we fall down its mouldy and rotten staircases, we are haunted by strange sounds and odours from its mysterious recesses; we move among phantoms we cannot consciously control. As we emerge into the world of daily life again, for an instant the sunlight seems to flash into the obscure house before the door closes behind us; we catch one vivid glimpse of the chambers we have been wandering in, and a few more or less fragmentary memories come back to us of the life we have led there. But they soon fade away in the light of common day, and if a few hours later we seek to recall the strange experiences we have passed through, it usually happens that the visions of the night have already dissolved in memory into a few shreds of mist we can no longer reconstruct. For most of us our whole knowledge ends here. Our dreams are real enough while they last, but the interests of waking life absorb us so entirely that we rarely have leisure, and still less inclination, to subject our sleeping adventures, trivial and absurd as they must usually seem, to the careful tests which waking intelligence is accustomed to subject more obviously important matters to. The world of dreams and the mysterious light which prevails there[1] are abandoned entirely to our sleeping activities.