The sensation of flying is one of the earliest to appear in the dreams of childhood.[128] It is sometimes the last sensation at the moment of death. To rise, to fall, to glide away, has often been the last conscious sensation recalled by those who seemed to be dying, but have afterwards been brought back to life. Those rescued from drowning, for instance, have sometimes found that the last conscious sensation was a beatific feeling of being borne upwards. Piéron has also noted this sensation at the moment of death from disease in a number of cases, usually accompanied by a sense of well-being.[129] The cases he describes were mostly tuberculous, and included individuals of both sexes, and of atheistic as well as religious belief. In all, the last sensation to which expression was given was one of flying, of moving upwards. In some death was peaceful, in others painful. In one case a girl died clasping the iron bars of the bed, in horror of being borne upwards. Piéron, no doubt rightly, associates this sensation with the similar sensation of rising and floating common in dreams, and with the feeling of moving upwards and resting on the air experienced by persons in the ecstatic state. In all these cases alike life is being concentrated in the brain and central organs, while the outlying districts of the body are becoming numb and dead. In this way it comes about that out of dreams and of dream-like waking states, one of the most permanent of human spiritual conceptions has been evolved. To float, to rise into the air, to fly up to heaven, has always seemed to man to be the final climax of spiritual activity. The angel is the most ethereal creature the human imagination can conceive. Browning's cry to his 'lyric love, half angel and half bird,' pathetically crude as poetry, is sound as psychology. The prophets and divine heroes of the race have constantly seemed to their devout followers to disappear at last by floating up into the sky, like Elijah, who went up 'by a whirlwind into heaven.' St. Peter once thought he saw his Master walking on the waves, and the last vision of Jesus in the Gospels reveals him rising into the air. For it is in the world of dreams that the human soul has its indestructible home, and in the attempt to realise these dreams lies a large part of our business in life. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 100: Bk. IV. 1014-15: 'de montibus altis Se quasi præcipitent ad terram corpore toto.' ] [Footnote 101: 'It has many times happened to me,' says the innkeeper's daughter in _Don Quixote_ (Part I. ch. xvi.), 'to dream that I was falling down from a tower and never coming to the ground, and when I awoke from the dream to find myself as weak and shaken as if I had really fallen.'] [Footnote 102: Chabaneix, _Le Subconscient_, p. 43.] [Footnote 103: Herbert Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_, 3rd ed., vol. i. p. 773.] [Footnote 104: _L'Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et des Curieux_, May 31, 1906.]