(36) Miss Sullivan says, in her letter to me, that Miss Keller, in a book which she is about to publish, will give extracts from a College 'theme ' which she wrote about her dreams. She regards her pupil's dreams as to a considerable extent 'literary not only in their content, but in the way they phrase themselves to her,' and she thinks that they are largely suggested by her reading, and thus appear to her in a more ordered manner than is usual in dreaming. She says that Miss Keller is strikingly normal, that it has been the object of her education to make her so, and that she does not offer so much of 'unique data' to Psychologists as they might expect. She gives me interesting information about Miss Keller's character, which has indirectly a bearing on her dreams. She says that Miss Keller 'has never been detected in a wrong act,' and that she does 'not believe she has ever committed a wilful conscious wrong deed.' This and everything else communicated to me by her and others show that Miss Keller is a remarkabaly amiable lady. But the best people on earth do held and wicked things in their dreams, and therefore read with interest Miss Sullivan's further statement 'that the only wicked thing Miss Keller can remember doing in her dreams is murder, but always in defence of her teacher or of some one else.' This qualification, however, makes it no murder and no wickedness. But Miss Sullivan has been good enough to send me an unpublished fragment about her dreaming by Miss Keller herself, in her own type-writing, and this, perhaps, to some extent brings Miss Keller into line with what is normal among those who see and hear. She writes: 'There are some unaccountable things in my dreams. For instance, although I have the strongest, deepest affection for my teacher, yet when she appears to me in my sleep, we quarrel and fling the wildest reproaches at each other.' It thus appears that in dreaming she does things, which, like all other people, she would be sorry to do, and would not do, if awake - something contrary to her nature and to what is right. Miss Frances Cobbe, to whom I communicated the foregoing statement by Miss Keller, wrote me regarding it as follows:'I do not think that the theory of the non-existence of the moral sense in dreams [see paragraph (22)] could have a more striking exemplification than the case of the amiable Helen Keller. It is, of course, the working of the irascible passions in sleep which suggests her dreams {in regard to her teacher) - with no conscience {then awake) to control them.'

(37) Professor Jastrow, in his Fact and Fable in Psychology, gives a somewhat long account of Miss Keller's dreaming, sent to him by herself. In that account she says: 'Like most people, I generally forget my dreams as soon as I wake up.' This is no doubt true. It is the experience of every one. And it must be kept in mind that the remembered dream has probably had something special about it, which caused it to be remembered. It is not one of the ordinary dreams which fill up the hours of sleep. It is clear that no one can write an account of his dreaming, which is not founded on the small number of his remembered dreams. The many which are forgotten count for nothing. It follows that the account must be incomplete, and almost certainly inaccurate - perhaps highly inaccurate. Even the remembered dreams are only partially remembered, and in the telling of them there is nearly always a free editing. It is not believed that any one will question the correctness of this opinion. Miss Keller says further in what she wrote to Jastrow: 'I obtain information in dreams in a manner which it is difficult to describe; 'my mind acts as a sort of mirror, and thoughts describe (to me) the events going on around'; ' I could not see or hear, but my mind was my guide as well as my interpreter.' This is very interesting, but I shall leave it as it stands, and not risk a translation into what it appears to me to mean. She also says in this account of her dreaming, that she hardly ever dreams of anything that has happened the day before, by which I take it she means that she does not dream of occurrences as having taken place before the time of her dream. Everything in her dreams is present, as it is in the dreams of ordinary persons She says that her friends in her dreams apeak to her by their fingers, but that she herself, since she has learned in some measure to speak orally, speaks often in her dreams with her mouth. She writes of hearing in her sleep, just as she speaks of hearing when awake, as, for instance, when she says that she heard the roar of the Niagara Falls, by putting her hand on a pillow and feeling the roar. This feeling is hearing to her, and she speaks of it as hearing, quite naturally. So it is also with her use of the word seeing.

(38) Laura Dewey Bridgman, the other blind and deaf girl who was successfully educated, was born in 1829 and died in 1889. She was not so highly educated as Helen Keller, but still her education was full, and her case attracted much attention. George Combe and Charles Dickens both visited her during their stay in America. The oral teaching of the deaf-mute had not then made such progress as it had done when Miss Keller's education was in progress, and consequently Miss Bridgman had to depend almost entirely on finger speech.

We have an important statement by Dr. Howe as to her dreams. It was written after she had been for some time under his care and observation, and he must be regarded as spenking with weight and authority. He says that he had not been able to obtain any evidence of a spontaneous activity of any part of the brain, which would give sensations to a person in Laura's condition, resembling those arising from the action of light and sound on ordinary persons. So far as he could discover, her dreams were only the spontaneous production of sensations similar in kind to those which she experienced when awake. She often related that she had dreamt of talking with persons, hut when asked if she had talked with her mouth, her answer always was an emphatic 'No - 1 dream to talk with fingers.' She never dreamt of seeing people, but only of meeting and touching them in the way she did when awake. This is briefly what we learn from Dr. Howe. There is perhaps more looseness when her dreams arc spoken of by her governesses, in the account of her life and education by Mrs. Lamson, but their records nevertheless leave the matter substantially where Dr. Howe eaves it. Mrs. Lamson says that she dreamed of her mother and baby sister, and talked with her lingers to them, but could not give particulars of her dream satisfactorily. In one dream she said that she thought she felt some one walking, and when asked if she had heard the person walking, she corrected and said 'felt' She never had dreams of seeing with her eyes or hearing with her ears. In sleep, as when awake, she depended on touch.