aneous-automatism, at last
with violence arouse the active conscious-centers. And these flash images
to the brain.

These nightmare images are very frequently purely mechanical: as of
falling terribly downwards, or being enclosed in vaults. And such
images are pure physical transcripts. The image of falling, of flying,
of trying to run and not being able to lift the feet, of having to
creep through terribly small passages, these are direct transcripts
from the physical phenomena of circulation and digestion. It is the
directly transcribed image of the heart which, impeded in its action
by the gases of indigestion, is switched out of its established
circuit of earth-polarity, and is as if suspended over a void, or
plunging into a void: step by step, falling downstairs, maybe,
according to the strangulation of the heart beats. The same paralytic
inability to lift the feet when one needs to run, in a dream, comes
directly from the same impeded action of the heart, which is thrown
off its balance by some material obstruction. Now the heart swings
left and right in the pure circuit of the earth's polarity. Hinder
this swing, force the heart over to the left, by inflation of gas from
the stomach or by dead pressure upon the blood and nerves from any
obstruction, and you get the sensation of being unable to lift the
feet from earth: a gasping sensation. Or force the heart to
over-balance towards the right, and you get the sensation of flying or
of falling. The heart telegraphs its distress to the mind, and wakes
us. The wakeful soul at once begins to deal with the obstruction,
which was too much for the mechanical night-circuits. The same holds
good of dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping through narrow
passages. They are direct transfers from the squeezing of the blood
through constricted arteries or heart chambers.

Most dreams are stimulated from the blood into the nerves and the
nerve-centers. And the heart is the transmission station. For the
blood has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It has a deeper,
elemental consciousness of the mechanical or material world. In the
blood we have the body of our most elemental consciousness, our almost
material consciousness. And during sleep this material consciousness
transfers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The transfer in
wakefulness results in a feeling of pain or discomfort--as when we
have indigestion, which is pure blood-discomfort. But in sleep the
transfe