ling on her
part.[82]

The two lower senses, smell and taste, seem to play a less-important
part in the production of dream-illusions. Radestock says that the odour
of flowers in a room easily leads to visual images of hot-houses,
perfumery shops, and so on; and it is probable that the contents of the
mouth may occasionally act as a stimulus to the organ of taste, and so
give rise to corresponding dreams. As Radestock observes, these lower
sensations do not commonly make known their quality to the sleeper's
mind. They become transformed at once into visual, instead of into
olfactory or gustatory percepts. That is to say, the dreamer does not
imagine himself smelling or tasting, but seeing an object.

The contact of objects with the tactual organ is one of the best
recognized causes of dreams. M. Maury found that when his lips were
tickled, his dream-fancy interpreted the impression as of a pitch
plaster being torn off his face. An unusual pressure on any part of the
body, as, for example, from contact with a fellow-sleeper, is known to
give rise to a well-marked variety of dream. Our own limbs may even
appear as foreign bodies to our dream-imagination, when through pressure
they become partly paralyzed. Thus, on one occasion, I awoke from a
miserable dream, in which I felt sure I was grasping somebody's hand in
bed, and I was racked by terrifying conjectures as to who it might be.
When fully awake, I discovered that I had been lying on my right side,
and clasping the wrist of the right arm (which had been rendered
insensible by the pressure of the body) with the left hand.

In close connection with these stimuli of pressure are those of muscular
movement, whether unimpeded or impeded. We need not enter into the
difficult question how far the "muscular sense" is connected with the
activity of the motor nerves, and how far with sensory fibres attached
to the muscular or the adjacent tissues. Suffice it to say that an
actual movement, a resistance to an attempted movement, or a mere
disposition to movement, whether consequent on a surplus of motor energy
or on a sensation of discomfort or fatigue in the part to be moved,
somehow or other makes itself known to our minds, even when we are
deprived of the assistance of vision. And these feelings of movement,
impeded or unimpeded, are common initial impulses in our
dream-experiences. It is quite a mistake to suppose that dreams are
built up out of the purely passive sensati