The dream that a beast or bogey pursues you and that you suffer from a paralysis preventing your escape, as well as the dream that you are drawn irresistibly to a burning fiery furnace or other undesirable place, may arise from a recollection of childish terrors, aided, as has been suggested to me, by the comparative inability to move one's limbs in sleep. My correspondent, who ascribes the falling dream to an inheritance from our anthropoid days, has no trouble in explaining the bogey dream in a like fashion. From my own experience I am satisfied that the bogey dream is nearly, if not quite, always caused by physical discomfort, whether arising from the operations of digestion or the position of the body; but I cannot find that any particular form of the bogey dream follows any particular form of the physical discomfort.

A startling kind of bogey is suggested by a child's dream that the ticket collector came to the door of the railway carriage with the face of a monster. This dream might be the punishment of conscience for travelling first class with a third class ticket.

By no effort of will, I think, are we able to suggest dreams to ourselves. One correspondent I have quoted as telling me that if he wishes to avoid dreaming of any particular subject he concentrates his last waking thoughts on it in the assurance that it will then not recur in his dreams. But reason and volition are not always, though they are generally, fast asleep, for many of us are conscious of willing effectively the continuance of a pleasant dream, although we cannot suggest it to ourselves effectively in the first instance, nor renew it after being fully awake. Moreover, when we come to mature years it happens now and then that we have a recurrence of the bogey dream or nightmare that so vexed our childhood, and therein it occurs not very unfrequently that we recognise the torment to be a dream affair and force ourselves to awake from it, knowing, although we know it to be a dream (a very singular feature of the business) that it will continue to torment us if we let it run its course.

This, if nothing else, would suffice to show that reason and volition are not always in complete abeyance during sleep, and further the fact that this dream terror or nightmare is so much more common with children than adults is probably due in great measure to the fact that their less developed powers of reason and will are more easily and completely overcome in sleep. To a rather similar cause we may perhaps attribute the dreams of terror that attend the sleep of those whose powers of mind and will have been weakened by illness, by excessive drinking, or, generally, by any abnormal and prolonged strain on the nerves.

I will now proceed to quotation, under their own headings, of the more interesting instances of the commoner kinds of dreams that correspondents have been kind enough to send me.