It all goes to show that the mind has stored up within it recollections of various kinds which the will is not always potent enough to summon into consciousness, but which something (probably some often unsuspected association of ideas) accidentally recalls. But we are wandering into fields of speculation outside our beat It is essential, however, to realise that dreams have, properly speaking, no being unless they can be remembered when we awake. Without this a dream cannot be said to have occurred, in any sense that is humanly speaking intelligible, any more than there can be deemed to be any continuity of the ego, or of the individual existence, except on the assumption that in the future life we are to have remembrance of our being In this life.

It scarcely needs to be observed that the great majority of the classes into which we have put dreams are of the kind that would be described as bad dreams rather than good. Two of the classes only suggest pleasurable emotions; the dream of flying, which always gives a feeling of satisfaction, and the dream that a darling wish has been fulfilled. In my own childish days the darling wish of my life was to possess a watch, and in dreams it happened to me over and over again to have this good gift bestowed on me, though such a mighty event did not happen in real waking life till many a year afterwards; and it was often the matter of my keenest debate whether it was better in ultimate result to have a good dream or a bad one, so sore was the disappointment when I awoke to find the unsubstantially of the good gift that I had supposed to be given me. On the other hand, in case of the bad dreams that were so often the consequence of the fearful intemperance of childhood in such matters as jam tarts and unripe apples, the relief of waking to find that all the dreadful imaginings were without foundation - that one was not between a dragon's claws or at the foot of a precipice - was worth almost all the suffering of the previous imaginary pangs.

There is scarcely a question but that the most frequent and universal of all the forms of bad dreams consists in the fancy that we are falling down a precipice of prodigious height, or sometimes it may be only the moderate, yet sufficient height of an ordinary staircase. And yet in any case the height does not make much difference, for just as the Irishman - the proverbial Irishman - is fabled to have said that it was not the falling that hurt him but the sudden stopping at the bottom, so here, in this falling dream, we invariably escape the hurt that would naturally result from the sudden stopping at the bottom, because in these dream experiences no one has ever yet been known to come to the bottom at all. It is popularly said that if one did dream of coming to the bottom one would die; but that is not easily proved, because the only man in any position to speak decidedly and of first - hand experience on the subject, would be, by the hypothesis, one of the dead men who tell no tales. The fact remains that no one has ever yet dreamed himself to the bottom of the precipice,1 though the dream of being in mid - air is so very frequent, and though one is conscious of a vague and dreamy surprise that one does not mind the falling so much as one expected.

All these sensations are most excellently worked into that best of books of dreams, Alice in Wonderland. The fidelity to the vague inconsequent manner of dreams in the way in which all the incidents take place is its highest artistic triumph.

The number of people who fly in their dreams is not nearly as large, according to any computation that I have been able to make, as the number who fall. Perhaps the proportion is about as one to three. That is not to say that the same people do not both fall and fly. Indeed, the falling dream seems almost universal among those who are conscious of dreaming at all. And it is virtually impossible that the flying dream should be as common as the falling dream, because it is distinctly pleasurable and satisfactory, whereas the majority of dreams are eminently disagreeable. There are many more bad dreams than good, even as appears from the above category, and the bad are far more often repeated. There is a peculiarity about the flying dream that seems to be very constant. Of all those whom I have asked about the matter, and who are conscious of the flying dream at all, hardly one has ever known himself to make any high flights in his dreams. One almost always flies low, with a skimming manner, slightly but only slightly above the heads of pedestrians. And one's critical attitude in a dream towards ones own performance is always interesting to note, both in regard to this particular class of dream and even more towards one of the other classes.

It is an attitude that is well brought out in Alice in Wonderland, where Alice is made to exclaim or to

1 But see page 118.

■ think, while she is falling, "How brave they will all think it of me at home, not to mind a great fall like this."We all have this feeling I fancy, in the falling dream, a pleased surprise that it hurts us so little. And in regard to the flying dream we are all conscious of a sense of satisfaction, of superiority to our poor crawling fellow mortals on the earth by virtue of our capacity for flight, even though it be lowly flight. But we are not unduly elated or proud, and it is one of the most constant and curious characteristics of dreams that all our experiences in them are somewhat at a lower temperature, the same in kind but different in degree than they would be under like circumstances occurring in waking life. Thus although the pedestrians over whose heads we skim, using our arms wing - like, with a kind of swimming action, appear to be a little surprised and disposed to admiration of us, yet they do not express anything like the degree of surprise and admiration that they would infallibly evince if they saw us in this aerial disport in real life.