[155] The special characteristics of dreaming in the hysterical were studied, before Freud turned his attention to the question, by Sante de Sanctis (I Sogni e il Sonno nell' Isterismo, 1896). See also Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 3rd ed., 1910, 'Auto-erotism.'
[156] Gissing, the novelist, an acute observer of psychic states, in the most of his books, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, has described this phenomenon: 'Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any association or suggestion that I can discover, there rises before me the vision of a place I know. Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show itself to my mind's eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search may trace its origin.' Gissing proceeds to say that a thought, a phrase, an odour, a touch, a posture of the body, may possibly have furnished the link of association, but he knows no evidence for this theory.
[157] Extrospection has been specially studied by Vaschide and Vurpas in La Logique Morbide.
[158] On the psychic importance of fears, see G. Stanley Hall, 'A Study of Fears,' American Journal of Psychology, 1897, p. 183. Metchnikoff (Essais Optimistes, pp. 247 et seq.) insists on the mingled fear and strength of the anthropoid apes.
[159] Foucault has pointed this out, and Morton Prince, and Giessler (who admits that the wish-dream is common in children), and Flournoy (who remarks that not only a fear but any emotion can be equally effective), as well as Claparède. The last remarks that Freud might regard a fear as a suppressed desire, but it may equally be said that a desire involves, on its reverse side, a fear. Freud has indeed himself pointed out (e.g. Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. 1., 1909, p. 362) that fears may be instinctively combined with wishes; he regards the association with a wish of an opposing fear as one of the components of some morbid psychic states. But he holds that the wish is the positive and fundamental element: 'The unconscious can only wish' ('Das Unbewusste kann nichts als wünschen'), a statement that seems somewhat too metaphysical for the psychologist.
[160] Thus A. Wiggam ('A Contribution to the Data of Dream Psychology,' Pedagogical Seminary, June 1909) records a great many wish-dreams, mostly in the young.
[161] Laud, Works, vol. iii. p. 144.
[162] Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. iii., 'Love and Pain.'
[163] The dramatic element in dreaming was dealt with at length by Carl du Prel (Philosophy of Mysticism, vol. i. ch. iii.), but he threw little light on it.
[164] Thus in the Psychical Research Society's 'Report on the Census of Hallucinations,' the case is given of an over-worked and worried man who, a few moments after leaving a tram car, had the vivid feeling that some one touched him on the shoulder, though on turning round he found no one near. He then remembered that on the car he had been leaning against an iron bolt, and that, therefore, what he had experienced was doubtless a spontaneous muscular contraction excited by the pressure (Proceedings, Society for Psychical Research, August 1894, p. 3). Touches felt on awakening, in correspondence with a dream, are not so very uncommon. Thus Wagner, when in love with Mathilde Wesendonk, wrote, in the private diary he kept for her, how, after a dream, 'as I awoke I distinctly felt a kiss on my brow.'