When living in the south of Spain, I awoke early one morning, and heard a mosquito buzzing. I fell asleep again and dreamed that a huge insect--as large as a lobster, but flat like a cockroach, and scarlet in colour--had alighted on my hand. The creature had two long horns, and from each of these proceeded numerous very long and delicate filaments which were inserted into my hand to a considerable depth. I had to cut the creature in half, and draw away the forepart, which was attached to my hand, with great care lest I should leave portions of the filaments in the flesh. This animal seemed all the more unpleasant because it was noiseless, and its attacks, I thought, imperceptible. I appeared to be attacked by a succession of them. On awakening, there was irritation of the left wrist, as though the mosquito had bitten me, although I had long ceased to be bitten by mosquitoes. This dream, it will be seen, corresponds in an unusually close way to the idea of a presentative dream; imagination followed reality in presenting an insect as the cause of the sensation experienced (possibly because I had actually heard the mosquito when awake), but still, as in all dreams, the process was mainly central, and imagination was freely exercised in creating a creature adequate to explain the doubtless vague and massive cutaneous sensations transmitted to sleeping consciousness.[58] Perhaps one of the commonest skin sensations to excite dream formation is that of cold due to disturbance of the bed coverings. The following example may serve as an illustration of this class. I dreamed that I was in an hotel, mounting many flights of stairs, until I entered a room where the chambermaid was making the bed; the white bedclothes were scattered over everything, and looked to me like snow; then I became conscious that I was very cold, and it appeared to me that I really was surrounded by snow, for the chambermaid remarked that I was very courageous to come up so high in the hotel, very few people venturing to do so on account of the great cold at this height. I awoke to find that it was a cold night, and that I was entangled in the sheets, and partly uncovered. Nothing else had occurred to suggest this dream which sleeping consciousness had elaborated out of the two associated ideas of altitude and snow in order to explain the actual sensations experienced. It is noteworthy that, as in the dream just before narrated, there was here also a link with reality, this time furnished by the disarranged bedclothes.[59]