ar to be more
distinctly connected with a pathological condition of the nervous
system, and which, with respect to their practical consequences may
easily prove so disastrous.

_After-Dreams._

In concluding this account of dreams, I would call attention to the
importance of the transition states between sleeping and waking, in
relation to the production of sense-illusion. And this point may be
touched on here all the more appropriately, since it helps to bring out
the close relation between waking and sleeping illusion. The mind does
not pass suddenly and at a bound from the condition of dream-fancy to
that of waking perception. I have already had occasion to touch on the
"hypnagogic state," that condition of somnolence or "sleepiness" in
which external impressions cease to act, the internal attention is
relaxed, and the weird imagery of sleep begins to unfold itself. And
just as there is this anticipation of dream-hallucination in the
presomnial condition, so there is the survival of it in the postsomnial
condition. As I have observed, dreams sometimes leave behind them, for
an appreciable interval after waking, a vivid after-impression, and in
some cases even the semblance of a sense-perception.

If one reflects how many ghosts and other miraculous apparitions are
seen at night, and when the mind is in a more or less somnolent
condition, the idea is forcibly suggested that a good proportion of
these visions are the _debris_ of dreams. In some cases, indeed, as that
of Spinoza, already referred to, the hallucination (in Spinoza's case
that of "a scurvy black Brazilian") is recognized by the subject himself
as a dream-image.[101] I am indebted to Mr. W.H. Pollock for a fact
which curiously illustrates the position here adopted. A lady was
staying at a country house. During the night and immediately on waking
up she had an apparition of a strange-looking man in mediaeval costume,
a figure by no means agreeable, and which seemed altogether unfamiliar
to her. The next morning, on rising, she recognized the original of her
hallucinatory image in a portrait hanging on the wall of her bedroom,
which must have impressed itself on her brain before the occurrence of
the apparition, though she had not attended to it. Oddly enough, she now
learnt for the first time that the house at which she was staying had
the reputation of being haunted, and by the very same somewhat
repulsive-looking mediaeval personage that had troubled