Such phrases as 'dropping sleep-ward,' 'dropping off to sleep,' 'dropping into a slumberous state of mind,' represent fact or experience.

(20) A point of great importance is that during these brief periods - these moments - of sleep, dreams and hallucinations occur, and in the study of apparitions this fact must not be lost sight of, for it is nearly certain that many of the spectres we hear of are only dream hallucinations. They may present themselves in dreams during the momentary periods of sleep into which persons fall, and out of which they come, with extreme abruptness and without the consciousness of having been asleep. It seems to me almost beyond question that many apparitions are thus explained. That some of them are so explained is all but certain.

Perhaps I should illustrate how I think that apparitions may be nothing more than dream hallucinations. A. B., a gentleman of culture and strong character, called one hot day, after a hearty lunch, on an ecclesiastic in a high position, who happened to be engaged in his library at the time of the call. A. B. was shown into a room opening off the library, and requested to wait. He sat down beside a table, and, with his elbow resting on it, he leant his head on his hand. While in this position he saw a man in clerical costume come through the door communicating with the library, without any opening of the door, walk slowly down the length of the waiting-room, and pass out into the corridor, again without any opening of the door. A. B. was absolutely certain that he had seen an apparition, and was surprised and hurt when I expressed a doubt. He called on me to explain, and I said that it was at least possible that he had been asleep for some moments, that if he had slept at all, however short the time of the sleep, he must have had a dream, if I am right in thinking that there is no dreamless sleep, and that thus what he regarded as an apparition might be nothing more than a dream hallucination. He assured me persistently that he was continuously wide-awake, but I assured him that these moments of sleep often occurred without any consciousness that they had occurred. He refused to be deprived of his ghost, and I refused to believe in the supernormal when the normal was sufficient.

(21) The character of the thinking in dreams is what we should expect, if the views I have been enunciating are sound. Dream-thinking is rapid and confused -passes suddenly and frequently from one subject to another and from one place to another, without causing surprise - time and space are abolished - many adventures a re passed through in a very short time -living and dead persons appear together in one place, and then instantly in some other far-off place, either separately or in new associations - there is no coherence in the thinking - judgment is in abeyance - the most incongruous appearances or occurrences create no wonder, and there is often a confusion as to personal identity. The mind is in a state of anarchy, and thoughts 'riot on in confusion.' As Dale Owen says: 'We see, but not with our eyes; we hear, but not with our ears; we speak and are spoken to, without the sound of any voice; we are moved to pleasure, and anger, and passion with no objective reality to arouse these feelings; we reason incorrectly; time has no limits, nor has space; and the grave gives up its dead to us.'

The figures seen in dreams and the sounds heard in them have no reality. No doubt they are largely furnished by the memory of impressions made at some time on the senses, but it must not be forgotten that the figures of our dreams enter into combinations, undergo changes, and perform acts which have never been seen by us when awake. Dreams, in short, are by no means always mere echoes.

Things are seldom recognised in dreams as things of the past; everything is present and actual; we rarely imagine that we are thinking over, or relating to others, the story of past occurrences. It almost never happens in dreams that we think we are dreaming and know ourselves to be asleep, and, so far as I can learn, we never dream of previous dreams, which seem to fade away too completely, though it happens occasionally that a dream is repeated with more or less fulness, and also that a person, roused out of sleep in the course of a dream, may fall asleep again and resume his interrupted dream. During this short period of waking the dream hallucinations may seem to continue.

Dreams are not 'a mere repetition of sentiments and ideas previously experienced.' They are not 'subjective impressions of images already registered in the brain, practically the same to consciousness as impressions from real objects.' This would make dreaming a mere form of memory, but 'we imagine, create, and invent in dreams, though all such imaginings, creations, and inventions are useless, being the outcome of thinking when in a state of disorder. In our dreams we may see things we never saw, hear sounds we never heard, and do things we never did or saw done.'

(22) There is another character of sleep-thinking which has great interest. It has been discussed with fulness by the late Mies Frances Power Cobbe. I refer to the absence of the moral sense in sleep. It would shock us to know all the improper things which arc-done in sleep with unblushing effrontery by the most proper people. The sense that what we are actually doing is morally good or bad is never wholly absent in our waking hours, but, as Miss Cobbe says, perhaps a little too strongly, it is never present in a dream. We may at least go the length of asserting that ' if the moral sense be not wholly suppressed in sleep, there is certainly evidence enough that it is only partially active.' A kind-hearted person may commit a cruel, an honourable person a base, and a virtuous person an immoral deed in sleep, without feeling that anything wrong has been done. So much is certainly true. ' Passions which never for a moment sullied our consciousness, sentiments the very opposite of those belonging to our idiosyncrasies, present themselves in sleep, and are followed out by their appropriate actions, just as if we were then not ourselves at all.'