[185] American Journal of Psychology, July-October, 1903, p. 18.
[186] Chabaneix, Le Subconscient chez les Artistes, les Savants et les Ecrivains, 1897, pp. 45-8. Chabaneix was in touch with various persons of distinction, and one is inclined to identify the poet-philosopher with Sully-Prudhomme, at that time still living. Du Maurier's remarkable novel, Peter Ibbetson—which records similar serial dreams of union with a beloved woman after death, and seems to be based on real experience—may also be mentioned in this connection.
[187] Unconscious dream suggestions of this kind resemble, as R. MacDougall has remarked (Psychological Review, March 1898, p. 167), post-hypnotic suggestions.
[188] This type of dream—in which the emotion of the day is inverted in sleep, depressing emotions giving place to exalting emotions, and so on—is by some (Griesinger, Lombroso, Sante de Sanctis, etc.), termed the contrast-dream. The dream is in such a case, Sante de Sanctis remarks, complementary, having the same significance as a complementary after-image and indicating a phase of anabolic repair. Thus A. Wiggam (Pedagogical Seminary, June 1909), gives the case of a girl of twenty, who when tired and restless always has good dreams, while her dreams are bad when she is well and free from care. It should be added that, as understood by Näcke ('Ueber Kontrast-Träume' Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie, 1907), a contrast-dream is one that is in striking contrast to the dreamer's ordinary character. In this type of contrast-dream it is not quite clear that the mechanism is the same, and the contrast may sometimes be accidental. Thus a dream of being a soldier on a battlefield, with shells bursting around me, was merely suggested by a passage of Nietzsche, read in the evening, which contained the words 'the thunders of the battle of Wörth,' and the question of contrast or resemblance to my character and habits was irrelevant.
[189] Journal of the Anthropological Institute, July-December 1904, p. 339.
[190] See Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed., 1885, vol. i. ch. x., especially pp. 140, 182, 201, 772. Spencer believed that Lubbock was the first to point out this factor in primitive beliefs, which has been chiefly developed by Tylor. It is, of course, by no means the only factor. See post, p. 266.
[191] Thus Professor Beaunis (loc. cit.) considers that dreams furnish the only rational explanation of the belief in survival after death. Jewell, again (American Journal of Psychology, January 1905), also considers that dreams are responsible for primitive man's inability to conceive of death as ending our association with our friends; he brings forward evidence, highly significant in this connection, to show that children, on dreaming of the dead as alive, are influenced in waking life to doubt the reality of their death. Ruths, also writing since the publication of my first paper (Experimental-Untersuchungen über Musikphantome, 1898, pp. 438 et seq.), considers that the conception of an under-world is founded on dreams of the dead coming to life.
[192] It is as well to bear in mind that this dream occurred when Maury was a student, long before he began to study dreaming, and (as Egger has pointed out) was probably not written down until thirteen years later. On these grounds alone it is not entitled to serious consideration.
[193] As Sir Samuel Wilks once remarked ('On the Nature of Dreams,' Medical Magazine, Feb. 1894), 'The dreamer merely forms a mental picture, and the description of it he calls his dream.'
[194] Egger, 'La Durée apparente des Rêves,' Revue Philosophique, Jan. 1895, pp. 41-59; Clavière, 'La Rapidité de la Pensée dans le Rêve,' ib. May 1897, p. 509; Piéron, 'La Rapidité des Processes Psychiques,' ib. Jan. 1903, pp. 89-95; Foucault, Le Rêve, pp. 158 et seq.; Tobolowska, Etude sur les Illusions du Temps dans les Rêves du Sommeil Normal: Thèse de Paris, 1900.