One writes to me: "The packing up and many similar dreams" (which looks as if this again was an instance of the same dreamer suffering different kinds of the dream of trivial inconvenience) "I often have; but I almost always overcome the difficulties in the end".

I do not think that this successful finish is very typical or usual. The more usual thing is an awakening to a sense that the difficulties are ceasing to trouble but not to any sense that they are solved. It is as if the dream had gradually lost its reality before we awoke, but of course this does not necessarily imply that any length of time worth speaking of has passed between our awaking and the mental process in sleep which we remember when we awake. One would conjecture that the awaking was gradual in this, the normal type of this dream, unlike the swift recovery of all the working faculties which seems to accompany the awaking in consequence of a strong appeal to the senses or of a strong emotion caused by the dream process itself.

Another curious and not very usual form of the dream of trivial inconvenience, a correspondent narrates as follows: "My most usual troubled dream' not amounting to nightmare, is of going up narrow rough stairs, about unceilinged lofts, through low garrets, with gaps in the flooring, and finding myself in dismal places with no exit but a crack or finger hole, often seeing or fearing some haggish horror" The sight or the fear of the haggish horror might well seem to bring this dream under the head of the bogey dream, rather than that of the trivial inconvenience, were it not that the writer expressly says that it does not amount to nightmare. For all that, it does seem that when the "haggish horror" enters on the scene it must at once elevate the dream out of the class of trivial inconvenience, and perhaps the fact is that we may take the dreams as described here as fairly falling under two heads, the one, before the entry of the terror, under the trivial inconvenience head, the other, after the terrors appearance, the bogey heading. In any case the dream is a curious one, the more so as I should not gather, from the rest of this writers correspondence, that climbing about in lofts and garrets makes part of his ordinary walks in life.

And the dream of trivial inconvenience generally takes place amid the common surroundings.

The only other form of the trivial inconvenience dream that seems to me worth any special notice is the form in which it seems apt to occur to people who are fond of shooting. It is thus that one correspondent describes it, and his description is typical enough: "My most frequent nightmare" (but it does not really aspire to the dignity of nightmare) "is that I am shooting, and that my gun will not work. Sometimes it comes to pieces in my hands, sometimes I forget how to use it, and as my nightmare gun is no ordinary weapon, but a curious and complicated structure, this is not to be wondered at I am perfectly certain that if that gun were to be put into my waking hands, I should not be able to fire it. Then again, I always, being left - eyed, have to shut one eye when I shoot. In my dreams I often shut the wrong eye. Curiously enough, I was shooting one day this autumn when I was not very well. Everything went wrong with me, and at last, to my horror, I found myself shutting my right eye, exactly as in my dreams.

The sensation of waking nightmare was one of the most disagreeable I ever had, but I have never dreamed that particular dream since." The last sentences are interesting enough, but they go into a line of psychological speculation which does not strictly belong to dreams, although dreams cast a valuable light on it. To adhere by our own lines, it is to be noticed that this dream is fairly typical of the dream of trivial inconvenience as it assails shooters. Another has told me that sometimes the trigger seems to be made of india - rubber or some flaccid substance, so as to give the finger no power to pull the spring and release the striker. With another the striker seems padded, so that it will not explode the detonating charge, and yet another tells me that in dreams his gun often hangs fire for an unconscionable time, and the doubt whether or no it means to go off, long after the trigger has been pulled and the gun even been taken from the shoulder, is a very trying form of suspense. So it would be, were they aware of it, to all who might happen to stand in its line of fire.

From all such eccentricities of the shot gun may the good Mr. Purdey deliver us.

The writer whom I have quoted on this shooter's dream speaks of it as nightmare, but really the temperature of the discomfort does not rise to that of nightmare. Evidently this experience of the shooter rises in the scale of the disagreeable to just about the same standard as that of the clergyman who loses his place in church, or the traveller who cannot pack his clothes and misses trains. They are trivial inconveniences when all is said. They are not in the class of those nightmare bogeys that drive us into a cold sweat of terror, but rather of that class of familiar little troubles that drive the layman to profanity and the clergyman to such lighter efforts in the same line as the colour of his coat will permit him. One does not swear at the bogey of one's nightmare. He is much too terrifying.